(Washington Post) - The latest music video for a track off of the 4:44 album only features about a minute of rapping from Jay-Z. But the video serves as a sort of meta-commentary on black representation in media and artistic ownership.
Released on Friday (Aug 4) on Tidal (and everywhere next week), the video for Moonlight features some of the biggest rising stars in comedy re-enacting, line-for-line, scenes from a quintessential Friends episode.
Directed by Master Of None co-creator Alan Yang, the video even features a remake of the opening to the NBC sitcom - but using the song Friends by Whodini.
Comedian Jerrod Carmichael (The Carmichael Show) plays Ross. Issa Rae of HBO's Insecure plays Rachel. Lil Rel Howery (Get Out) plays Joey and Lakeith Stanfield (Atlanta) plays Chandler. Tessa Thompson (Creed) plays Monica and Tiffany Haddish (Girls Trip) plays Phoebe.
The actors are wearing almost exactly the same clothing as the characters in the 1996 Friends episode. The set looks the same. The shots are the same. When the cast takes a break, Carmichael chats with comedian Hannibal Buress offstage, who tells him what they're shooting is "garbage" and "just episodes of Seinfeld but with black people".
"It's Friends," Carmichael interjects, but Buress cuts him off: "Who asked for that?"
"When they asked me to do it, I was like, alright, this is something subversive, something that would turn the culture on its head," Carmichael says.
"Well, you did a good job of subverting good comedy," Buress says. "You gonna do black Full House next? Family Ties? Why stop there? Home Improvement?"
When Carmichael asks Buress what he's up to these days, Buress says he just booked a part in Pirates Of The Caribbean Cruise Line to play "a parrot with a bad attitude but he has a heart of gold. It's terrible, but it's way better than this s***."
Aside from Carmichael being the one to have this exchange - his critically acclaimed real-life show was cancelled by NBC this year as executives said "it was hard to find a stable audience" - the choice to remake Friends with an all-black cast is particularly poignant.
Many viewed the popular NBC comedy as essentially a white version of Fox's Living Single, which premiered a year before Friends and is also about six friends in New York City - who happened to be black.
"We knew we had already been doing that," Queen Latifah, star of the sitcom said earlier this year. "It was one of those things where there was a guy called Warren Littlefield, who used to run NBC, and they asked him, 'When all the new shows came out, if there was any show you could have, which one would it be?' And he said Living Single. And then he created Friends. But Friends was so good it wasn't like we hated on it or anything."
In the Jay-Z music video, the cast returns to the set and continues acting out scenes from Friends, but Carmichael is clearly shaken. The camera shows him out of the moment as Howery, Stanfield, Thompson and Haddish recite their lines. But when Rae re-enters the scene, she has a serious, knowing look on her face and signals to Carmichael to be quiet. She leads him off the set, and finally, Jay-Z raps: "We stuck in La La Land/Even when we win, we gon' lose."
That line, and the song's title, is an allusion to the unprecedented Oscars flub, when La La Land was mistakenly named the winner of Best Picture rather than the actual winner, Moonlight, a gay-themed film with an all-black cast. The mix-up, some argued, distracted from what should have been the Moonlight cast and crew's moment.
Carmichael walks off the set and sits on a park bench, reminiscent of a scene in La La Land, and stares up at the full moon. The song fades and the audio of that Oscars flub plays. Warren Beatty says, "And the Academy Award for best pictures goes to," then Faye Dunaway proclaims, "La La Land!" The audience applauds.
