After that annoying waiting period where only Tidal’s 43 subscribers could watch it, Jay-Z’s video for "Family Feud" is finally on Youtube. Predictably, it’s loaded with famous faces and looks expensive as hell.
The short film—it’s hard to call it a music video as the actual song only occupies two minutes of its eight-minute runtime and the whole thing wraps up with a cinema-style credits sequence—starts in the year 2444, with Thandie Newton presiding over the murder of her lover and abusive brother in a family dispute/consolidation of power. Through a series of related flashbacks, the video then tells the story of an Afrofuturist America in the aftermath of its adoption of a new constitution, one written only by women. The founding mothers are a star-studded crew, including Mindy Kaling, Brie Larson, Rosario Dawson, Constance Wu, Janet Mock, and are helmed by an adult Blue Ivy, played by Susan Kelechi Watson of This is Us.
As political messages go, it's a bit shiny and shallow. (Imagining a future where a rainbow coalition of girls really do run the world is all well and good, but the people in power all appear to be fabulously wealthy. What are the proles up to in this utopia?) But the video really picks up in the actual musical portion, when the Knowles-Carter clan files into a church and Jay begins to rap his heartfelt confession. Check it all out below.
