Jay-Z Confesses His Sins to Beyoncé in Ava DuVernay-Directed “Family Feud” Music Video

Jay-Z has been going all out with the music videos for his 4:44 album, and “Family Feud,” directed by Ava DuVernay, is the most visually stunning yet. The video, for now exclusively available on Tidal, takes viewers forward and then backward in time, imagining a future ruled by a royal family that has its roots in the Knowles-Carters, populated by cameos including Michael B. Jordan and Jessica Chastain, Thandie Newton, Trevante Rhodes, America Ferrera, Brie Larson, Niecy Nash, Rosario Dawson, David Oyelowo, A Wrinkle in Time’s Storm Reid, and more.

The video starts in the year 2444 with two murders, one of which is connected to the family of a future president, who explains his family’s commitment over the centuries to bringing peace to the nation. We go back in time to 2148, where two cops, one or both of whom are ancestors of this fictional president, uphold the law of the land. Then we go back again to 2096, where two medieval-looking armies clash with crossbows and spears. Then it’s the year 2050, and America’s multicultural Founding Mothers are together at a table discussing their new world order. Their leader, played by This Is Us star Susan Kelechi Watson, explains that no country can be free if all of its citizens aren’t free: “Ladies, this is just like the 13th Amendment. Some people have their liberties, and some people don’t. America is a family, and the whole family should be free. It’s like I remember my father saying when I was a little girl: ‘Nobody wins when the family feuds.’” As it turns out, she’s playing an older version of Blue Ivy Carter, whom, in the present day, Jay-Z sits down on a church pew before the song begins.

Then begins the actual music video portion, where Jay-Z confesses his deeply personal sins to Beyoncé, who sits in the priest’s side of the confessional box and stands in the pulpit in Russian Orthodox vestments—inspired costume. “A man that don’t take care his family can’t be rich,” he tells her, not aware, as we are, that the responsibility of the future lies on his family’s shoulders, but knowing that it very well could.