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Perhaps most importantly, Jay raps like a man once again comfortable in his own skin. chops Nina Simone’s “Four Women” into a kaleidoscope of pitch-shifted fragments that convey just as much meaning as Jay’s lyrics. Sometimes the samples tell their own story: On “O.J.,” I.D. There’s little here that sounds like it’ll be heard booming out of clubs a year from now, though the coffee shop-quiet storm aura exerts an undeniable pull. Frank Ocean, Damian Marley, and an uncredited Beyonce are given enough room to distinguish themselves, but superfluous cameos are as scarce as bandwagoning beats. (recently named an EVP at Capitol Music Group), who brings a sonic and thematic consistency to the album unseen since Jay’s earliest work with a young Kanye. And “glorified seat filler/ Stop walking ‘round like you made ‘Thriller’” functions as a great battle rhyme made all the better for having no explicit target.Ĭlocking in at a brisk 36 minutes - and limited to the “Illmatic”-minted 10 tracks - “4:44” was produced entirely by Chicago studio wizard No I.D.
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“Y’all flirting with death, I be winking through the scope” is a half-smirked Jay-Z threat of classic vintage. He’s still too self-mythologizing to let an album pass without mentioning he “did it all without a pen,” but he’s self-aware enough to add, “y’all knew that was coming? Had to remind you again.” “Moonlight” provides the “La La Land” diss that hip-hop never knew it was missing. Besides, your dad was right.Īnd yet “4:44” also sees Jay at his funniest. “You know what’s more important than throwing money in the strip club? Credit.” Jay knows he sounds like your dad here, but he seems fine with that. “Family Feud” offers a plea to patronize black businesses, and “Story of O.J.” is an intriguingly nuanced combination of post-Reconstruction history lesson and fiscal responsibility seminar. On “Smile,” he warmly discusses his mother’s long-secret homosexuality - “Had to hide in the closet, so she medicate/ Society’s shame and the pain was too much to take” - and leaves her to read a lovely bit of verse on the outro. Unlike Kendrick Lamar’s “DAMN.,” he refrains from referencing President Trump directly, but the album is suffused with a sense of sudden sobriety: Whereas 2011’s “Watch the Throne” was Jay’s sometimes shallow attempt to equate his own material success with the optimism of the Obama era, “4:44” tries to audit where it all went wrong. On the knife-twisting final verse, he ponders someday having to explain his betrayals to his daughter: “My heart breaks for the day I have to explain my mistakes/ And the mask goes away and Santa Claus is fake.”Īs much as the album serves as a long mea culpa, Jay is frequently able to make the personal political. Repeating “I apologize” seven times and sometimes abandoning rhyme entirely, his voice flattens into a low murmur as he takes stock of his own faithlessness and latent misogyny. Sure to attract the most media interest here is the title track, where Jay offers confession after confession to his spurned spouse, sounding genuinely broken. Of course, for all his exasperating bluster, Jay has always made room for moments of genuine introspection - the ghoulish self-reckoning of “D’Evils,” the bitter sarcasm of “You Must Love Me” - but never has he allowed himself to stand so nakedly unguarded. The man who once pleaded guilty to a third-degree assault charge and then immediately turned “not guilty!” into a Top 10 chorus is nowhere to be found here. Here, he lays it all on the line with arresting candor: “Crazy how life works/ You got a knot in your chest? Imagine how a knife hurts,” he raps of the Un attack. On the self-lacerating opener “Kill Jay-Z,” he wastes no time dredging up three of the ugliest incidents from his own biography: Shooting his older brother in the shoulder at age 12, stabbing Lance “Un” Rivera in a nightclub in 1999, and the alleged infidelities that set gossipers aflame when his wife Beyonce alluded to them on last year’s “Lemonade.” Of those first two incidents, Jay was scarcely even forthcoming in his own memoir. But Jay pins the biggest bullseye on his own back. The album’s targets range from the deserving (Bill Cosby) to the left-field (Eric Benet) to the sure-to-be-Twitter-fodder-for-weeks (Kanye West).