While the Beyhive is naturally “abuzz” with the delight of a “new” Beyoncé song (even if it’s merely a “from the vault” track originally recorded in 2013), it has to be said that all “Morning Dew (DONK)” serves to prove is that the crux of Beyoncé’s solo career has been about singing cringe-y “lust” songs to and about Jay-Z. And yes, she had plenty of time to cultivate that lust, considering the two first met when she was sixteen years old, during the video shoot for “No, No, No.” It was November 1997, and Jay-Z himself was just about to turn twenty-eight on December 4th.
And yet, in 2008, Beyoncé would then famously claim to Seventeen that she had first met Jay-Z when she was eighteen, at the MTV Spring Break Festival in Cancún in 2000. As if to quell tongues wagging about “impropriety”—considering she was still a teenager when they started dating—in 2013, she would also tell Oprah, “We were friends first for a year and a half before we went on any date. On the phone for a year and a half. And that foundation is so important in a relationship. And just to have someone that you just like, you know, is so important. And someone that is honest.” Ha! That would prove to be quite an interesting word choice to describe Jay-Z, considering she would end up making an entire album about his dishonesty: 2016’s Lemonade.
As for Jay-Z’s history of infidelity rumors, one could argue they all started with the speculations that he had a “thing” with Rihanna back when she was still considered his “protégée.” Or rather, the sixteen-year-old he signed to Def Jam. Ah, that number again: sixteen. He seems to have a thing for up-and-coming women in pop and R&B. The Rihanna rumors were only further stoked by the B’Day single “Ring the Alarm” and “Resentment” (a song Cardi B also references in her own song about a cheating cad, “Thru Your Phone”). In the years that followed, other rumors about who Jay-Z cheated with would also swirl, ranging from Rita Ora to Rachel Roy (funnily enough, both women with “R” first names and three-letter last names). And yet, over the years, for as many “done wrong” tracks as Beyoncé released, she offered up just as many “Jay-Z makes me so horny” songs.
Granted, her feelings for him started out “innocently” enough on 2002’s “‘03 Bonnie & Clyde,” when the lyrics were still filled with “sweet” expressions like, “Down to ride till the very end, it’s me and my boyfriend” and “Nobody or nothing will ever come between us/And I promise I’ll give my life/My love and my trust, if you was my boyfriend.” Six years later, he was her husband, and the songs about him had gotten decidedly more cringeworthy. And since their 2008 nuptials, the opportunity for Bey to write some gnarly sexually-oriented lyrics about him has only increased. Whether it was “Déjà Vu” (complete with one of Beyoncé’s most notoriously awkward videos, which offered a “light” pantomime of giving Jay-Z a blow job), “Ego,” “Love on Top,” “Drunk in Love,” “Blow,” “Rocket” or “Plastic Off the Sofa,” she’s rarely missed an opportunity to speak lasciviously on a man that Azealia Banks would probably call one of the least visually alluring in the rap game.
Indeed, Banks essentially said what everyone was thinking after Beyoncé unveiled a cover of Dolly Parton’s seminal track, “Jolene,” for her Cowboy Carter album: “Who is this imaginary adversary that she thinks still wants to be involved with Jay-Z in 2024? She needs to change the subject. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, finds him attractive.” But, clearly, Beyoncé meant what she said on “‘03 Bonnie & Clyde” about being “down to ride till the very end” (in “Morning Dew (DONK),” she repurposes that to, “You need a woman holdin’ you down whenever, wherever, however, whatever, I’ll be right by your side”). Even when that meant watching Jay-Z grow increasingly unappealing in manifold ways. For it isn’t just the physical that people have called out about him in more recent years, but also his highly suspicious ties to Sean “Diddy” Combs and the Epstein files. Not to mention his ties to the former resulting in an allegation from a woman who came forward to say she was raped by Combs and Carter in 2000 at the age of thirteen at an MTV VMAs afterparty. The lawsuit was ultimately dropped, but the smoke remains present.
Nonetheless, Beyoncé has only doubled down all the more on the whole “stand by your man” shtick with a song like “Morning Dew (DONK),” which, oddly, isn’t even from the B’Day era, but rather, something that was recorded during the Beyoncé period. Begging the question of why she feels obliged to release it on the reissue of B’Day. Apart from looking for any reason to somehow try to 1) outshine Madonna’s Confessions II release weekend (as if) and 2) call attention once again to how horny she supposedly feels toward Jay-Z (and yet, the trope goes that if you talk that adamantly about something, chances are, you’re overcompensating for how much you don’t feel it [hear also: Taylor Swift’s gross-ass “Wood” from The Life of a Showgirl]).
More cringeworthy still, Beyoncé seems to forget that she oughtn’t call attention to the fact that she was of a high school age when she started “talking to” Jay-Z, gushing, “I think I wanna go back to school and have my locker full of pictures of you/So give me that ‘A’ in biology, I’m graduatin’ soon.” It doesn’t get more shudder-inducing than that. Except, oh wait, it does. Because Beyoncé keeps carrying on, “Then he said,/‘Girl, you’re sexy in the morning/You know you turn me on, babe/You know the sun rise for you/Give me that morning dew/You know that I want it/I want you moanin’ every morning.’” As for the demand to give him “morning dew,” it can apply both to him wanting to find Beyoncé “wet” in the morning and to him wanting to be made to cum upon awakening. Either way, this isn’t something that anyone wants to imagine, yet it’s all they can while listening to this song.
In other moments, Beyoncé veers toward trying to create something like a more “poetic” “WAP” by describing, “There’s a river inside that flows from our love/You can tap in but don’t, don’t tap out/Oh, that’s a slip in the slide/Front to back love/Right there, baby.” As if that weren’t enough, the “DONK” part of the title is short for “donkey” (which she keeps intermittently repeating). Interpert that how you will, but it obviously means “donkey dick.” Huge, massive, etc. Which, one supposes, is also meant to refer to “Mr. Carter’s” “size.” Incidentally, the word “donk” in British slang means, “a foolish, clumsy or inept person.” Which is far more applicable to the likes of Jay-Z.
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