Jay-Z and Beyonce‘s video for ‘Family Feud’ has sparked outrage from the Catholic League, with the organisation branding it ‘exploitative’.
The video for Jay-Z’s song – which is taken from the Brooklyn rapper’s thirteenth studio album ‘4:44’ and features guest vocals from Beyoncé – premiered on Tidal last month (December 29).
The nearly 8-minute long video sees Jay-Z take his daughter Blue Ivy Carter into a church where he confesses his sins to Beyoncé.
The Catholic League, who are not officially connected to the Catholic church, have now released a statement from its president Bill Donohue, condemning the rapper’s latest visuals.
“Jay-Z’s recently released “Family Feud” video shows him walking into a Catholic church with his real-life daughter, rapping away—”Nobody wins when the family feuds”—as he struts,” Donohue writes. “This is followed by a flashback scene where he is shown kissing a gal in her undergarments. Then Beyoncé appears, standing at the pulpit, wearing a navy blue outfit dressed like a queen. She is a priestess: she hears Jay-Z’s confession, apparently a statement on his real-life infidelities.
.@S_C_’s “Family Feud” x 12/29 x #TIDAL: https://t.co/We5OlPBrLl pic.twitter.com/sNoRbI8R56
— TIDAL (@TIDAL) December 28, 2017
“Is it anti-Catholic? No, it is not a bigoted assault,” he adds. “Indeed, it pales next to Jay-Z’s relentlessly racist (and anti-black) lyrics. But it is nonetheless gratuitous as well as exploitative, just the kind of thing we would expect from this genius couple.”
‘Family Feud’ is one of a number of tracks on ‘4:44’ that sees Jay-Z address his infidelity, with the rapper also speaking about being unfaithful to Beyoncé during an interview with The New York Times in November.
Describing how he had been raised to “put on this shell of this tough person”, Jay went on to say: “You shut down all emotions. So even with women, you gonna shut down emotionally, so you can’t connect… In my case, like it’s, it’s deep. And then all the things happen from there: infidelity.”