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About Love (2021)

What do old white companies do when they want to appeal to young, urban, cool types, and sell more stuff? Apparently, they hire R & B and hip-hop royalty to rep their companies and push them into the 2020’s.

Enter Beyoncé and Jay-Z, looking longingly at each other as she, sporting Tiffany’s 30-million-dollar diamond (supposedly worn by only four other women), plays a piano serenading her husband with (sorry folks) a rather mediocre, and over-wrought rendition of the great standard “Moon River”.

We then see her on a private jet – alone and contemplative – before the film flashes back to Jay-Z typing, not on a high-tech twenty-first-century computer, but on a twentieth-century typewriter. Our descent into nostalgia is not yet over as we next see him use equally historic video camera technology to film his beautiful and talented wife. Behind him, one of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s famous graphic graffiti paintings, known for their cutting political commentary, adorns the walls.

Would Basquiat (b.1960 – d. 1988), the brilliant and gone-too-soon American painter of Haitian and Puerto Rican ancestry have wanted his painting to be used as a prop to sell anything for Tiffany? Do Tiffany, Beyoncé and Jay-Z give a damn? The commercial says otherwise.

Do we like to see black couples “all loved up”? Hell yes! But released in the fall of 2021 when the world was still paralyzed by the Covid-19 pandemic and many normal black folks were struggling to make ends meet at public-facing jobs with little to no benefits, non-existent sick leave, and low wages, this ad was just plain tone deaf!