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AlbaMoretz Ağustos 18, 2021

beyonce biography

Matthew McConaughey and Beyoncé Did More for Texas Than Ted Cruz - Texas Monthly

Posted: 26 Feb 2021 09:50 AM PST

Hollywood has surely never seemed so far from Texans' minds as in the last two weeks. Not only did the most brutal winter storm we've seen in generations sweep away any idle thoughts of movie stars sunning themselves along the Pacific coastline, it replaced them with curdled resentment as we warmed ourselves with propane grills and burning hatred toward our local utility companies. For the millions who lost power, it also completely shut off our screens, with movies, TV, and celebrity gossip becoming distant concerns as we spent our dwindling batteries on futilely refreshing outage maps.

Painfully aware of this shift in priorities, several Texas celebrities set aside their own privileged lives and stepped up to help. For most of them, simply not being Ted Cruz might have sufficed. But the bare minimum has never been good enough for Beyoncé. Instead, the Houston star set up a financial assistance program through her BeyGOOD foundation, joining with Adidas and the nonprofit Bread of Life to offer up to $1,000 in individual disaster relief payments. Naturally, the response was overwhelming, drawing more than 130,000 applications in the first 24 hours, forcing the program to shut down until all of those initial submissions can be reviewed. In the meantime, BeyGOOD continues to work on the ground in Houston, distributing water and hot meals to thousands in need. (Meanwhile, Cruz made sure to pose for photos while handing out water bottles, before heading to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) to complain about "cancel culture.")

Like Beyoncé—and Cruz—Sandra Bullock no longer spends much time in Texas, having left her adopted Austin home for New Orleans some years ago. Yet she continues to give back to her erstwhile state nevertheless. Bullock, who memorably contributed $1 million to Hurricane Harvey relief in 2017, recently donated $250,000 to the Central Texas Food Bank on behalf of her Ocean's 8 castmates, in a clever scheme to assist people in need and make Ted Cruz look like a feckless weasel. And although Kacey Musgraves has similarly left Austin for Nashville, the East Texas country star combined good deeds with dunking on Cruz by selling a "Cruzin' for a Bruzin'" T-shirt, raising thousands for the Texas Red Cross and other local charities in the process. So in a way, maybe Ted Cruz helped after all. 

Still, whether it's the collapse of our energy grid or our entire social order, there's no celebrity Texans have come to rely on in a crisis quite like Matthew McConaughey. This week in McConaughey was an unusual one marked by solemn duty and humble servitude, as the Austin actor continued to plant the seeds under his gubernatorial grow-light by "sending prayers of resilience and the humanity of the helping hand out to all Texans that are struggling with the freeze," while offering his slightly more tangible assistance to Meals On Wheels, the Austin Boys and Girls Clubs, and the Austin Urban League. McConaughey also released one of his ever-soothing video chats—set, statesmanlike, against a somber black curtain and an American flag—to announce an upcoming "virtual benefit" he's putting together that will aid relief and rebuilding efforts. He also pledged that Matthew McConaughey will continue to be a daily voice of authority and assurance on how our state can "get back to livin'." Overall, it's a clip and message that would prove highly effective in any future campaign for governor—or hell, senator.

George W. Bush, Pete Buttigieg, and Chance the Rapper Added to SXSW

While the effects of the storm will likely linger for months, in many ways it already feels like a fading nightmare, receding in sunnier temps behind more pressing, familiar anxieties. Offering some sign that things are slowly returning to our rather skewed sense of normal, this week South by Southwest released the full and final lineup for its 2021 virtual edition, running entirely online from March 16 through March 20. In addition to the previously announced keynote from Wille Nelson, hosted by Texas Monthly's own Andy Langer, this year will feature newly added speakers like former President George W. Bush, filmmaker Ava DuVernay, and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, along with a conversation between Chance the Rapper and Saturday Night Live's Kenan Thompson, a discussion on creating socially distanced TV with the cast of The Daily Show, and—in what would be the fest's most dystopian panel in any non-pandemic year—a talk with Fleetwood Mac co-founder Mick Fleetwood about how to go viral on TikTok. 

Registration for SXSW is still open, and although paying $249 to stream panel sessions, films, and music performances from your couch is decidedly "not the same," it's arguably more than worth it when you consider that: a) for once, you're guaranteed entry to everything; b) you don't have to wait in any lines or spend $30 in pedicab fees desperately crisscrossing downtown Austin just to catch it all; and c) if you ever get bored, you can always just click over to something else, instead of trying to slink out of a conference room while hoping Pete Buttigieg doesn't notice.

Travis Scott Singlehandedly Saves Magazines

Houston rapper Travis Scott made his own contribution to Texas relief efforts, in typically surreal Travis Scott fashion, by donating a rare custom action figure of himself to a charity auction for the Ronald McDonald House Charities of Greater Houston/Galveston. Still, Scott was slightly more focused this week on aiding another foundering institution: print media. In Los Angeles, he hosted a pop-up to promote his recent takeover of i-D magazine. The new Scott-directed "Utopia Issue"—which features cover photos of the rapper taken by Spike Jonze, along with a conversation between Scott and Austin filmmaker Robert Rodriguez—launched this week with a splashy event at a faux newsstand erected in West Hollywood, where hundreds of fans swarmed the streets and tied up traffic, just to catch a glimpse of him while he signed autographs and waved from a sunroof. The unauthorized event drew the ire of the city, as TMZ reports that L.A. officials are now investigating Scott and potentially getting ready to levy fines if the city determines he broke COVID regulations. Something tells us he can afford it.

Taylor Kitsch Takes Another Run at TV Stardom

Friday Night Lights alum Taylor Kitsch has been an Austin resident for years now, a quiet retreat from Hollywood life that's been made all the more manageable by the fact that, sadly, Kitsch still hasn't blossomed into the kind of marquee name he probably should have been. But this week brings news of another gig with the potential to change all that (again): Variety reports that Kitsch has signed on to star opposite Chris Pratt in the Amazon series The Terminal List, an adaptation of Jack Carr's bestselling novel of the same name. Pratt will play a former Navy SEAL who returns from a covert mission gone awry, only to discover a vast conspiracy that may be working against him. Kitsch will play Pratt's best friend, a fellow SEAL who will help Pratt's character get revenge using his intelligence savvy and, hopefully, his way with disarmingly soulful insights. 

Megan Thee Stallion Rings in "Mean Girl Winter"

In a week in which so many Texas celebrities were seen giving back, the muted response from those who didn't has, unfortunately, been all the more noticeable. For example, Houston's own "H-Town Hottie," Megan Thee Stallion, spent the days surrounding the storm being markedly quiet about the plight of her home state, causing some to lash out in misdirected anger. But although, sure, it might have been nice for Megan to offer some assistance, or even just pay some empathetic lip service in an Instagram video, the fact remains that we didn't elect her to anything. Megan's sole responsibility is providing "Hot Girl Summer" vibes, as valuable a resource as any in the wintry blight. Unlike certain politicians, it's actually fine if Megan just wants to jet off to Cancun right now—or, more pertinently, star in this Mean Girls spoof for Coach.

The New York Fashion Week campaign sees Megan doing her best Regina George, vamping and twerking on the football field while various movie-versions-of-teens gush things about her like, "I heard her favorite movie is an anime based on her own life, and it won Best Picture." The ad is silly and completely inconsequential, a charitable gift of amusement and distraction in trying times, and it offers the comfort that, no matter how bad things get, Megan Thee Stallion will always persevere. Maybe that doesn't seem like much, but it's a sentiment we could all draw inspiration from right now—and if your name's not Ted Cruz, that's really all we expect. 

Shifting the Center of American Music from Bob Dylan to Beyoncé Knowles - Jezebel

Posted: 25 Feb 2021 07:30 AM PST

There are those who say that the lore of the modern rock and roll archive starts here, deep in the rustic outer country of upstate New York, in a house affectionately nicknamed Big Pink because of its gaudy, pastel siding. Here in West Saugerties, New York in 1967, Bob Dylan and the Toronto outfit once known as the Hawks and now simply as "the Band" are down in the basement singing songs about Bessie Smith and ye "old, weird America," as Greil Marcus famously puts it. Here in this place and in the same year that Rolling Stone magazine would be born and set into play a kind of self-congratulatory music criticism that haunts our present-day taste-making institutions and Bradley Cooper's A Star Is Born dreams, here in the same year that King would deliver his "Beyond Vietnam" speech condemning American empire and exposing its inextricable ties to racial and class terror, the same year that over 150 communities of the working poor, the urban and distressed, from Newark to Detroit and beyond would light up in rebellion—in the run of that roiling epoch, a band of brothers (one with indigenous roots, another with a notoriously fabulist past) laid down tracks that stoked the mythologies associated with rock history and the fetishistic, deep wonk ways that certain kinds of cultural histories get rendered as "precious," get dubbed as worthy of "preservation," while other forms are left to seemingly fade away.

Illustration for article titled Shifting the Center of American Music from Bob Dylan to Beyoncé Knowles
Image: Harvard University Press

The "Basement Tapes," as they came to be known, were recorded that year in relative isolation and under the cover of Dylan's storied convalescence in the wake of a nasty motorcycle accident in 1966. They were mischief-making jam sessions featuring one-offs, breakdowns, wistful ballads, whiskey-soaked supplications, and roughshod odes to the open road. They were tavern blues and campfire tales, "casual recordings . . . more than one hundred performances of commonplace or original songs." They were documents of young white men (or "white-seeming" men in the case of guitarist Robbie Robertson) who were armed with, among other things, Dylan's trademark esoteric lyrics (albeit a bit leaner here), his always-elsewhere, punctum vocals, which he shared with Robertson and Rick Danko (who takes lead on the song "Bessie Smith"), and the insistent warmth and elegiac tenor of Garth Hudson's Hammond organ and accordion work.

Fourteen songs pressed into permanence on an acetate disc and passed around—first to fellow musicians and then bootlegged all across the rock and roll universe by 1970. Their major-label release in 1975 was cause for celebration among the critics and fans who longed for the chance to further archive the rehearsals and experimentations of that sacred rock bard, forever shrouded in mystique, forever the iconic ideal, forever the romantic embodiment of all that is putatively authentic and organic in popular music culture—in spite of the fact that he himself reveled in the talents of his own endless mythmaking.

What The Basement Tapes held out to Dylanites, however, was the assurance of pure and unadulterated art, resistant to commerce, pounded out on the ground floor of a house rental in upstate New York. This was a music-making "laboratory," as Marcus refers to it, "where, for a few months, certain bedrock strains of American cultural language," he argues, "were retrieved and reinvented." Yes, there were those naysayers who called out the slacker tendencies of a collective that appeared to pay little (or not enough) mind to their own—"This Wheel's on Fire"—American present ("these were deserters' songs," cries one critic in 1990s hindsight), but to those haters Marcus would famously offer an extended treatise on the prodigious value of the tapes in the ways that they document "an unimaginable speech, an undocumented country," an "invisible republic," "music made to kill time that end up dissolving it." As is the case with all of his signature work, he is transfixed by a song's ability to encapsulate a constellation of rhizomatic historical moments, to condense the most romantic elements of American history—"the Puritan's dares" and folkloric outlaws' death wishes—and transduce them into present-day articulations of longing and suffering, adventuresome pleasure and playfulness. If these tunes sound familiar, uncanny, maybe even a bit clichéd with their country twang and frontier saloon sadness, they do so purposefully, according to him, in order to convey larger truths about the human condition. They are songs that stage scenes of "Comedy and Tragedy sitting down for a long bout of arm-wrestling with a drunken mob cheering them on," as he puts it.

Black feminists—musicians, critics, and fans—are repeatedly on the sidelines of the sidelines watching all of this go down. There's no shade that I'm throwing here, only the simple and yet thoroughly underacknowledged fact that in the big, hallowed intellectual histories of popular music culture and the practices of collecting, memorializing, and assigning value to sonic art, Black women are rarely in control of their own archives, rarely seen as skilled critics or archivists, all too rarely beheld as makers of rare sounds deemed deserving of excavation and long study. In the world of the Tapes, even Bessie Smith, the blues empress whose legend has spawned generations of poetry, theater, dance, visual art, and book-length explorations and tributes, makes a cameo in the service of the Band and Dylan's typically solipsistic pilgrimage toward the talismanic powers of a long-lost "friend" who, as the lyrics go, shared with them "the good times and the bad." Back in those days, we're told, our protagonists "didn't worry about a thing." They wonder whether it was "her sweet love or the way she could sing." Tapes collectors and critics tend to spend little time with this song other than to squabble over sound quality and the question of whether this track—with its noticeable studio polish—even belongs in the "Big Pink" sessions. As Yoncé Knowles might say (channeling Karen O and calling out to Bessie), "They don't love you like I love you."

It is for me, therefore, a perhaps quixotic exercise, a compelling riddle in the legend of the Tapes, to imagine otherwise, to envision a world in which sisters not only make glorious, pathbreaking sounds but also listen to, love, collect, think about, write about, and find ways of preserving and passing forward their sounds. This is the kind of labor that might capture the attention of our cultural imaginaries such that we might more fully grasp the vastness of the "invisible republics" that they've built for us, that constitute our modern sonic lives. Along these lines, then, this study has been an exercise in calling attention to this phenomenon of Black feminist sonic archiving and taking seriously the critical practices of musicians and critics whose work as such was often chiasmic. It has been a call to spend more time with these artists who are spending time with the archive.

We hear them all in the basement, and here again we might heed Marcus's words: "Where the past is, in the basement recordings, in the mood of any given performance, is the question to ask the music and the question the music asks. This question raises the frame of reference that each performance passes through as if it were a door. In the chronology remade in the Catskills in 1967, the basement was an omphalos and the days spent within it a point around which the American past and future slowly turned." The omphalos, the hub, the focal point of Black feminist sound, these sites of Black feminist archiving demand more legible and cared-for cartographies so that we might better hear and grasp the magnitude of this dazzling and gripping work about Black women's pleasure and joy, suffering as well as survival as it flows forth from their own laboratories where cultural memory and future possibility intersect and yield new meaning.

Way down low. That's where we're ultimately heading before coming up for air. The implication is such because of the spiraling architecture, the slow- rolling, vertiginous crawl of the camera that hugs walls and creeps around corners. Just a hint of the string-tinged, echoing trace of our reigning pop empress's self-defense Ole Opry anthem lingers in this cavernous space. Fading vocals whisper to us that threats abound, that trouble lurks here.

Blink and you'll miss it, but the transition—from wide-open, out-on-the- range horse-riding and Afrocowboy socials to the stark, cold enclosures of a cement fortress parking structure—is one of the most pivotal moments in Yoncé Knowles's 2016 Black feminist magnum opus, Lemonade, her New Orleans reclamation manifesto, a work that, as the vast majority of pop fans good and well know now, has been tilled many times over with passion and mostly with great care by everyone from that obsessive fan "hive" to critics and scholars across the globe. (I would place my money on a hunch that it is arguably now the most "reviewed" album of all time if we count the hundreds of blog posts and think pieces that flourished on social media alongside formal press outlet analyses in the weeks and months following Lemonade's premiere on HBO on April 23, 2016—and I most certainly would do just that.)

The majority of pundits have zeroed in on how much place matters in this epic work and the extent to which the Crescent City emerges as a key character—from the quotidian grandeur of marching bands strutting down the streets of the Algiers neighborhood to the shots of Lake Pontchartrain's lush splendor, the sun-kissed sands of Fontainebleau State Park, and the ludic energy of Bourbon Street.

This insistence on reckoning with the location, location, location that matters in Lemonade is for sure built out of the grist of woman-of-color critical thought and study emerging over the past decade and a half—most notably in the work of scholars like Katherine McKittrick and Mary Pat Brady, both of whom illuminate the ways that aesthetics are the tools by which the historically marginalized might reoccupy, redesign, and reframe sites of wounding and catastrophe, gross neglect, and forgotten and undervalued loopholes of retreat. McKittrick has, for instance, influentially shown us how Edouard Glissant's "poetics of landscape allow black women to critique the boundaries of transatlantic slavery, rewrite national narratives, respatialize feminism, and develop new pathways across traditional geographic arrangements; they also offer," she adds, "several reconceptualizations of space and place, positioning black women as geographic subjects who provide spatial clues as to how more humanly workable geographies might be imagined." And before her it was Chicana feminist scholar Mary Pat Brady, who made the contention that we should take seriously how "the imbrication of the temporal within the spatial . . . illustrates" that, in spite of the long colonial-neoliberal project's "seemingly successful abstraction of space," in spite of a long systemic game to convert people's land into "geometric homogeneities" and a "quantitative" set of ideas from that of vibrant human dwelling, in spite of the tenacity of capitalist expansion and state surveillance, there are nonetheless "alternative conceptions" of the spatial that challenge "oppressive" alignments of power and instead privilege revolutionary socialities.

This is the undergirding philosophy of Lemonade, that Black women activists—Mothers of the Movement and culture workers, musicians and dancers, athletes and actors, legendary chefs and Mardi Gras masqueraders—might reinhabit the ruins of our spurned history, might reclaim the earth and overrun the wilderness with our wildly sensual and sumptuous, celebratory selves and ultimately birth a new time and restorative, new collectivities. The journey to get to there, though, requires roaming fields, bursting through floods, levitating on slick, firewall roads, walking through flames, and plunging to new depths, to the bottom of oceans of despair, beneath shipwrecks that left bodies in the wake.

Even before we hit rock bottom in the parking lot with her, Our Lady Knowles is on a subterranean expedition in Lemonade, one that is loaded with counterhistorical meaning, taking us to the place where buried New World truths lie. Her plunge reminds us of Glissant's wisdom yet again, how he calls out to us to heed the bottom of the sea, the sedimentary layers of traumas submerged. Early on we see her falling into a deep-blue netherworld, her house that is not a home now capsized.

Her resurrection yields waves of operatic wrath in multiple pop registers, giving context and meaning to the forgotten sisters, the phantoms made flesh once more and here to walk and sit among us until we might reckon with their beings, incorporate their pasts into our ontological present. She is our sonic archivist, the one who banana dances to the beat of Josephine; the one who does it "Proud Mary" style like electric Tina; the one who drops the stank funk like Betty in a spy movie send-up; the one who gives good glam as Supreme Lady D; the one who is our ride-or-die chic Etta at Chess Records. She is someone who's long been interested in staging scenarios (pace Diana Taylor) and engineering the mechanics of Joe Roachian surrogation to yoke her own ambitions and aesthetic lifeworlds with those of her predecessors.

This Lemonade joint, though, takes the scale of her vision to vaster territories— up, out, and beyond her own performed effigy—to focus instead on a beloved city, an entire territory, a region as the locus of our Black diasporic dreams as well as our chronic New World sorrows, the capital of our twinned economy of grief and obstinate reinvention. Beyoncé's lyrical fable offers to us a Lemonade subterranean that is the repository of all that has been discarded yet remains with us at the very core of our everyday lives. It is the site of the basement tapes of a Blackness born out of the fact of history's racial and gender and class brutalities. It is a work that releases the pent-up energy of Black folks' misbegotten value—that which is stored up in the sediment of our culture—and sends it back into the atmosphere.

Excerpted from LINER NOTES FOR THE REVOLUTION: THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE OF BLACK FEMINIST SOUND by DAPHNE A. BROOKS, published by The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2021 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Beyonce’s Mom Tina Knowles-Lawson Pens ‘Love Letter’ to ‘Brave and Classy’ Son-In-Law Jay-Z: ‘You Are a True Man’ - Us Weekly

Posted: 22 Feb 2021 02:43 PM PST

Raise a glass! Tina Knowles-Lawson praised son-in-law Jay-Z in a lengthy open letter after he sold 50 percent of his champagne brand, Armand de Brignac, to luxury goods company LVMH.

Beyoncé's mother, 67, gushed over the "Empire State of Mind" rapper, 51, in a "love letter" posted via Instagram on Monday, February 22. The Texas native said that she was inspired to pay tribute to Jay-Z (born Shawn Carter) after his record label, Roc Nation, helped curate the entertainment for Super Bowl LV.

Beyonce's Mom Tina Knowles-Lawson Gushes Over Son-In-Law Jay-Z 2
Tina Knowles-Lawson MediaPunch/Shutterstock

"Everyone was psyched about it! Each person that performed Jazmine Sullivan, H.E.R. and The Weekend all slaying their performances and making Black Excellence shine and us all proud," Knowles-Lawson wrote. "I could not help but remember when J took on being in charge of the Entertainment at the Super Bowl, and saying that things would never change unless we had someone on the inside that could make decisions. Someone at the top."

Though he was called "a sellout" and received "big time" criticism, Knowles-Lawson was impressed by the way the New York native "kept it moving" and stuck to his mission.

"One thing that I've noticed about Jay is that he doesn't let what people say bully him into not doing the things that he knows are right," she continued.

Along with Roc Nation, the "Holy Grail" artist runs music streaming platform Tidal and has owned Armand de Brignac since 2014. On Monday, the Grammy winner closed a deal with LVMH's Moët Hennessy, selling half of the champagne brand for an undisclosed sum.

Beyonce's Mom Tina Knowles-Lawson Gushes Over Son-In-Law Jay-Z
Jay Z and Beyonce Knowles Richard Young/Shutterstock

"Jay I salute you and your Latest venture … You are a bad ass brother and I hope that you continue to pave the way for others like you have in the past!!" Jay-Z's mother-in-law concluded in her sweet tribute. "And I have seen such extreme kindness and generosity so many times that people don't even know anything about! You are a true man who has admitted publicly when you've made mistakes in a very brave and classy way! You have in turn influenced the Culture of Young Black Men. You are a Bad Ass brother. I love you so much!! ❤️."

The "4:44" rapper married the "Formation" artist, 39, in April 2008. In January 2012, they welcomed their first child together, daughter Blue Ivy. Five years later, fraternal twins Rumi and Sir were born.

While speaking with Us Weekly exclusively in February 2020, the former hairstylist noted that she wanted to leave behind "a lasting legacy" for her daughters, Beyoncé and Solange Knowles, and her grandchildren.

"Well, what I want to be remembered by is that I made a difference in life. Nothing else matters as much as that," Knowles-Lawson said at the time.

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Beyoncé Teams With Lorraine Schwartz To Offer Scholarships to GIA For Aspiring Jewelry Makers - AllHipHop

Posted: 27 Feb 2021 12:06 PM PST

(AllHipHop News) 

Beyoncé and renowned jeweler Lorraine Schwartz have teamed up to create a new scholarship aimed at diversifying the jewelry business.

The Beyoncé Knowles-Carter x Lorraine Schwartz GIA Scholarship will award two scholarships to the Gemological Institute of America's (GIA) Graduate Gemologist program through distance education.

Beyoncé is not only giving away two scholarships to GIA's program, but she's also paying all of the associated expenses. 

"It is an honor to have this scholarship in my name, but the best part is teaming up with my friend Lorraine Schwartz to give two people an opportunity to learn," said Beyoncé. "We both believe that learning is constant. This is a chance to learn from the best, create generational wealth and turn a love of gems into a career."

The scholarship was born through Beyoncé and Lorraine's close friendship throughout the years. When Beyoncé turned 39, one of the gifts she received from Lorraine was one of the scholarships to GIA

GIA linked up with the pair to match the funds for a second scholarship and the Beyoncé Knowles-Carter x Lorraine Schwartz GIA Scholarship was born with a mission to transform recipients' gem and jewelry aspirations into a reality. 

Beyoncé will be very hands-on with the scholarship. She will be selecting the two winners of the ex scholarship. 

Applications for the scholarship will be accepted from March 1 at 9:00 am PST to March 16 at 11:59 pm PST. For more information and to apply, visit 

It has been a busy month for the Carters. 

Last week (February 20th), Beyoncé released her highly anticipated Icy Park collection with adidas, while Jay-Z sold half of his Armand de Brignac champagne brand to LMVH.

At the same time, Jay and Bey have been just as focused on their philanthropic efforts.

Beyoncé's BeyGOOD Foundation announced the organization was offering $1,000 to Texas residents who were impacted by two devastating snowstorms. 

And Jay-Z is raffling off an ultra-rare bottle of D'usse, to benefit his Shawn Carter Foundation which creates programs for at-risk youth.

Kelly Rowland on the Emotional Moment Beyoncé and Michelle Williams Met Her Infant Son: 'A Gift' - PEOPLE

Posted: 18 Feb 2021 12:00 AM PST

Kelly Rowland on Beyoncé, Michelle Williams Meeting Her Son | PEOPLE.com

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Inside Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s European Vacation - Showbiz Cheat Sheet

Posted: 24 Feb 2021 05:20 PM PST

Beyoncé and Jay-Z have worked diligently at their respective careers, having the success that most of us only dream about. However, as hard as the A-list couple works, they also spare no expense when it comes to relaxing.

With so much at their disposal, the Brooklyn-born rapper and the Houston-born singer are determined to show their children as much of the world as possible. Though they've been spending quality time as a family amid quarantine, the pair are no strangers to stunning family vacations.

Beyoncé and Jay-Z sensational European vacation from 2018 is still incredibly aspirational.

Beyonce and Jay during the Men's Final on Day Fifteen of the 2011 US Open

Beyonce and Jay | Al Bello/Getty Imag

How many years have Beyoncé and Jay-Z been together?

In his song, "4:44" Jay-Z references the fact that he and Beyoncé became an official couple on the singer's 21st birthday which would have been September 4, 2002. The pair initially met in 2000 while attending MTV's Spring Break Festival.

The singer was in a relationship at the time and she was attending the festival with her group Destiny's Child who was already skyrocketing as one of the best-selling girl groups of all time. The Brooklyn-born rapper was 30 then and had already released five albums.

The duo reconnected the following year at the 9/11 "Concert for New York City." The Blueprint rapper asked a now-single Beyoncé for her number, and the pair began dating. However, until they tied the knot in 2008, the couple did not talk about their relationship with the media.

RELATED: Beyoncé's Spending Habits on Fitness Are Much Cheaper Than You'd Expect

Where do Jay-Z and Beyoncé vacation?

With a combined net worth of well over $1.5 billion, the Everything Is Love artists spare no expense when it comes to rest and relaxation. The couple has found opulent vacation spots globally, including Hawaii, Italy, the Dominican Republic, Thailand, and Rome.

The duo took their three children on a low-key quarantine vacation in Sept. 2020 where they rented a luxury mega-yacht that cost $2 million per week. RAP UP reported that the ship is named LANA is longer than a football field and features eight en-suite staterooms, seven VIP rooms, and a master suite. It has room for 12 guests and 34 crew members.

The couple also loves to visit Paris. Their go-to hotel is the Hotel Le Meurice, which costs an astounding $20,000 per night for its two-story penthouse. The massive overlooks the Tuileries Gardens in Paris. It includes a private kitchen, a glass-enclosed dining room, and an enormous private open-air terrace.

Beyoncé and Jay-Z's European vacation in 2018 was lavish

In 2018 between the European and North American legs of their On the Run II tour, the power couple vacationed in Europe sailing around the Mediterranean sea in billionaire Shahid Khan's mega yacht.

Beyoncé shared snaps of the family vacation on her website via PopSugar. The photos included stunning outfits, snaps of their children, Blue Ivy, Sir, and Rumi lounging by the pool, and more picture-perfect moments. The couple visited various museums in Europe. The Carters were also joined by the singer's mom, Tina Knowles Lawson.

The couple stopped everywhere from Nice to Paris soaking up the sun and taking in the waves.

If Bianca Lawson Is Beyoncé's Stepsister, Who Are Her Parents? - Distractify

Posted: 17 Feb 2021 12:00 AM PST

The fountain of youth is real and 41-year-old actress Bianca Lawson is living proof of this fact. Since starring in our old school favorites like Save the Last Dance, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Sister, Sister, Bianca has not aged a day and fans are wondering if the secret behind her beauty is the result of good genes — or magic. So, who does Bianca get her good looks from?

Bianca Lawson's parents are actor Richard Lawson and actress Denise Gordy.

Bianca Lawson was born to parents Richard Lawson and Denise Gordy in March of 1979. The former couple, who initially married in 1978, divorced only a year after Bianca was born. A few years ago, Bianca, who seems to have a close relationship with both her mother and father, previously posted a heartfelt Women's History Month tribute to her mother, who Bianca says nearly died during childbirth. 

bianca lawson parents
Source: Getty Images

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She captioned a photo of Denise, "In light of it being #womenshistorymonth and the month of my born day, I'd like to honor the most important and influential woman in my life, my mother, Denise Georgette Gordy. We both almost died giving birth to me, but she pushed us through! She's THAT powerful. Mom, you are a force to be reckoned with, my guide and my light. So grateful our souls chose each other this incarnation."

Denise, who is also the biological mother of Motown heir Marvin Gaye III, was the niece of Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr. and his sister, Anna Gordy Gaye — Marvin Gaye's wife until the couple filed for legal separation in 1973. While Denise never remarried, Richard found love and put a ring on one of the most famous matriarchs in pop culture. 

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bianca lawson parents
Source: Getty Images

After Richard's divorce from Denise, Bianca's dad got married to Beyoncé's mom, Tina Lawson.

After Richard's divorce from Denise, he was reportedly a free agent until meeting Beyoncé's mom, Tina Lawson. The two began their courtship in the summer of 2013, shortly after Tina finalized her divorce with ex Matthew Knowles in 2011. Tina told ESSENCE, "When I went through my divorce, I decided that I was going to pray this time for someone, then God sent me someone." 

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Tina continued, "I prayed for the specific qualities I wanted in a man and I wasn't going to settle for anything less. I really didn't even know what I wanted, so you have to spend some time to try to find out what that is. Plus he's fine!"

Source: Instagram

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Tina and Richard married in 2015, ultimately making Bianca a stepsister to Beyoncé and Solange Knowles. The idea to tie the knot, Tina says, came from her granddaughter, Blue Ivy Carter.

Tina explained, "[In September] we went on a boat with Beyoncé and Jay-Z for her birthday, and when we came out one night dressed to go to dinner, Blue said, 'Oh, ya'll look beautiful. When are ya'll getting married?' Richard said, 'Oh, Blue, soon. Do you approve?' And she said yes. That's the first time we talked seriously about getting married."
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