【搬运】【译】洛杉矶时报评The Carters 2018年专辑《Everything Is Love》

搬运自：微信公众号【评论搬一堆】（在原文基础上添加了英语原文与排版调整）

翻译：黄琦

校正：Cyana Lu/Ryan-Chopin

作者：MIKAEL WOOD

Some acts finish a concert with an encore. Beyoncé and Jay-Z? By now we should know they think bigger.

On Saturday, pop’s No. 1 power couple revealed at the end of a show in London that they’d just released a new album, “Everything Is Love.” It’s the first joint full-length from the married singer and rapper, who’ve been collaborating with increasing frequency — and to increasing scrutiny — since the early 2000s.

流行乐坛中最具影响力的夫妇在其伦敦表演快结束时透露，他们刚刚发布了一张新专辑，《Everything Is Love》。对于这对已婚的歌手与说唱艺人而言，这是他们第一次进行如此完整的合作。早在21世纪初，两个人逐渐投身于彼此的合作，也为本专辑进行了更多相关音乐性的审查。

“No need to ask — you heard about us,” Beyoncé sings in one new song, and the data backs her up: Within hours of their announcement, “Everything Is Love” was dominating social media around the globe. (Initially available only through Tidal, which the couple partly owns, the album had made it to other streaming services by early Monday.)

Although it’s been in the works for years, “Everything Is Love” — with nine songs, one bonus track and an accompanying music video, set in the Louvre, for a cut with an unprintable title — plays out that notion of an encore.

“你无需去问，便可以听到我们内心的声音。” Beyoncé在新歌中有这样一句歌词，而数据显示这张专辑有着很高的支持度：在刚宣布新专辑的短短几小时内，《Everything Is Love》占据了全球各大社交媒体的主流地位。（一开始，只有Tidal分享相关音乐资讯，这对夫妇在其中占有部分股份，周一上午时本张专辑的资讯也走向了其他主流服务商。）这张专辑花费了几年时间来制作完成，《Everything Is Love》，内含九首歌曲，一首特别单曲，和一个附随音乐视频。视频本在卢浮宫拍摄，却因为一个不宜播出的标题而停拍，甚至面临着重拍的处境。

The project follows two earlier solo albums, Beyoncé’s 2016 “Lemonade” and Jay-Z’s 2017 “4:44,” that depicted a marriage in crisis; each was exacting in laying out one side of the tale. Now the two superstars, secure in our familiarity with the details, have come together to assure us they’ve made up.

Indeed, things are good enough for Beyoncé and Jay-Z (who was born Shawn Carter) that “Everything Is Love” is billed officially to the Carters.

这张专辑是在前期发行了两张个人专辑之后发布的，Beyoncé于2016年发布的《Lemonade》，和Jay-Z于2017年发布的《4:44》，都描述了一段处在危机中的婚姻，他们各自详细地描述了自己的故事。现在，这两位巨星，在我们熟悉的日常细节中挽回爱情，携手向我们展示他们已经和解。甚至，有一则对Beyoncé和Jay-Z来说再好不过的消息，《Everything Is Love》成为了卡特夫妇的代名词。

“Let’s make love in the summertime,” Beyoncé suggests over a languid vintage-soul groove to open the album in “Summer.” Then she looks confidently to the future: “Make plans to be in each other’s arms.”

Part of what drove the couple’s reconciliation, the music suggests, is their shared success — the certainty, in other words, that neither could ever find another partner capable of pulling such weight. If their accomplishments unite them, though, they also emphasize their rare standing; the multi-act narrative they’ve spun over the last two years goes beyond their particulars to address the state of African American ambition.

On “Everything Is Love” the two flex their muscles like it’s an Olympic sport, with Jay-Z boasting that he turned down the Super Bowl halftime show (“You need me, I don’t need you,” he tells the NFL) and Beyoncé insisting that she doesn’t care about streaming numbers (which strains credibility until she points out that “Lemonade” still isn’t on Spotify).

Expensive brand names pepper the songs’ lyrics; Jay-Z acknowledges that celebrity has made him a legal target but then brags that he’s “show-up-to-court-without-a-suit famous.”

“让我们一起在夏日缠绵”，Beyoncé以一种复古灵魂乐来引出这张夏日的专辑。她看似对未来很有信心：”想要埋在别人的怀里。”我们能从音乐中看出，促使这对夫妇和解的一个原因是他们互相的肯定。换句话来说，他们都不能找到另外一个有能力充当对方角色的拍档。他们的梦想让他们走到了一起，同时他们也强调了他们特别的身份：在过去两年里，他们演绎了多样化的故事，这比他们致力于展示美国黑人志向更有说服力。

Yet for all they’re doing to burnish their legends, Beyoncé and Jay-Z want to be seen as unchanged by the game. In “Boss,” Beyoncé describes “dropping my daughter off at school every morning,” while “713” takes its title from an area code in the singer’s hometown of Houston.

“I put it down for the 713,” she proclaims, tweaking a line from “Still D.R.E.” by Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, “And we still got love for the streets.”

That’s not the only instance of recycling on “Everything Is Love.” In “Heard About Us,” Jay-Z and Beyoncé borrow the late Notorious B.I.G.’s “If you don’t know, now you know” chant from his song “Juicy”; “Friends,” about the value of one’s closest confidants, evokes Whodini’s classic by the same name (even as it takes an apparent shot at Kanye West, who previously nodded to the Whodini track in his “Real Friends”).

他们所做的一切可谓经典传奇，但抛开一切，Beyoncé和Jay-Z都会是初心不变的人。在歌曲“Boss”中，Beyoncé写到她会“每天早上接送女儿上下学”，同时“713”这首歌的名字也是来源于她的家乡休斯顿。在“Heard About Us”中，Jay-Z和 Beyoncé从歌手Notorious B.I.G.的“Juicy” 中的一句歌词“If you don’t know, now you know”里获取了灵感；“Friends”则是讲述关于知己的，重现了Whodini重名的这首音乐作品（我们甚至能在Kanye West曾经的歌曲“Real Friends”中发现他也模仿了Whodini）。

As these cozy interpolations make clear, the Carters are in a less adventurous mode here than they were on the kaleidoscopic “Lemonade” or the radically intimate “4:44.” Compared to those efforts — or to Beyoncé’s mind-blower of a performance at April’s Coachella festival — this album doesn’t seek to present either musician in a startling new light.

And some of the trap-inspired production, as in the unprintably titled song (which features input from Migos), can feel surprisingly ordinary, at least for a Beyoncé project.

But the inside references and the happy proximity to current rap also work in service of a larger point, which is thinking about black achievement in the context of a cultural and political system designed to hinder it.

当我们逐渐理解到这些歌词时，我们会发现相对于万花筒般的《Lemonade》或是非常暧昧的《4:44》，卡特夫妇实际是处在一种冒险性较低的模式里。相较于这些付出的努力和Beyoncé在四月份的科切拉音乐艺术节表演上带来的迷幻与震撼，这张专辑并没有力图在令人惊叹的新曙光下追求奇特的演绎形式或是追求其他音乐家们的肯定。那些有诱惑性的歌曲都打有脏标（参照Migos的音乐作品），这些片段让人感觉意外的新颖，也算是Beyoncé的一个新风格。但是作品里的一些暗示和刻意与当代rap的元素贴近也是本专辑大火的一大重要因素。歌中不乏隐喻：在文化与政治性中受到阻碍的背景下，黑人也取得了卓越的成就。

The Carters do that thinking vividly and explicitly in their new music video; it places the couple and a group of dancers amid some of the recognized masterworks of European art. (The album’s cover carries through that idea, with a black woman lovingly tending to a black man’s hair in front of the Mona Lisa.)

Yet “Everything Is Love” is full of subtler juxtaposition, as in “Boss,” where Beyoncé’s description of the wealth she and Jay-Z will pass down leads her to envision “a lot of brown children on your Forbes list.” In “Nice,” with a jaunty beat co-produced by Pharrell Williams, Jay-Z’s account of his jet-setting lifestyle — “My passport is tatted, it look like it’s active” — is interrupted by the arrival of a subpoena.

“Time to remind me I’m black again, huh?” he asks.

There’s an activist thrust to the love songs as well — to the welcome representation in a tune like “LoveHappy,” which closes the album, of a complicated but solid relationship between two adults who’ve endured “some things,” as Beyoncé refers to Jay-Z’s alleged infidelity.

“Baby, the ups and downs are worth it,” she sings over lush backing vocals and a crisp throwback beat, “Long way to go, but we’ll work it.”

卡特夫妇在制作他们新的音乐录影带时就有很鲜明和直率的想法。视频中人物构成主要为这对夫妇和一群舞者，视频中频现一些欧洲艺术界里著名的大师作品。（这张专辑的封面就证实了他们的想法，一位黑人女性在蒙娜丽莎的画像前亲切的抚摸着黑人男性的头发。）然而，《Everything Is Love》里有许多微妙的地方，正如”Boss”这首歌，Beyoncé对如今自己财富的描述是：她和Jay-Z会留下一笔财富，并构想“有许多黑人血统的孩子们位居福布斯排行榜上”。在“Nice”中，Jay-Z和Pharrell Williams合作创作出轻快的节奏，其中Jay-Z对富豪们生活方式的描述是：“我护照虽破，但看起来还是能用。”——他们的生活经常被法院的传票所打扰。

Mainstream art makes too little room for stories like that, especially when the grown-ups in question are people of color.

But the Carters won’t be denied on “Everything Is Love.” For them, this hard-won encore is also a beginning.

主流艺术对这种形式的音乐作品所给予的空间太小了，尤其是当这些音乐人、创作者是有色人种时。但是卡特夫妇不会因《Everything Is Love》而被否定。对他们而言，这份来之不易的共同演唱的机会也将会是一个新的起点。