Drunk in Love and That’s About Right

Beyoncé shot the Drunk in Love video on a beach, in black and white, barely dressed, soaking wet, and managed to make Jay-Z—a man whose primary contribution to music videos is standing very still while appearing to own the surrounding geography—look like the luckiest man alive. That takes something. She moves throughout the video in ways that seem physically impossible and not one second of it reads as calculated even though every single second obviously is. The gap between that much effort and that much ease is the trick she’s been pulling off her entire career.

The visual album dropped on iTunes without warning and Drunk in Love is its centre of gravity, the one that was always going to outlast the others. You can feel the Rihanna influence in the approach—that mode of explicit, unapologetic self-presentation—but Beyoncé takes it somewhere else, somewhere that feels like absolute control performing as abandon. Jay-Z shows up in the back half and doesn’t ruin it, which is genuinely more than you can say for most cameos in R&B videos.