J.,” Jay-Z raps about cross-generational wealth - passing his art collection down to his children - with the same fervor and lyrical gambit he once used to rap about amassing personal wealth (on “U Don’t Know,” in 2001).
In some plain narrative ways, “4:44” is a companion piece to Beyoncé’s “Lemonade.” On the title track, Jay-Z is vividly self-critical: “I’ve seen the innocence leave your eyes/I still mourn this death,” he tells his wife.īut the two albums also share an emphasis on black self-sufficiency - on “Lemonade,” the argument was sociopolitical here, it’s largely financial. These aren’t stories told to fortify a magisterial image but rather the exhale of a long-held breath. Jay-Z has been this candid before, but never quite this naked. Only extreme emotional-spiritual catharsis or extreme stripped-down intimacy would make for a worthwhile comeback. Find new life or accept death.Īs an elder statesman - recently the first rapper to be enshrined in the Songwriters Hall of Fame - Jay-Z would have been forgiven for tapping out and letting silence be a kind of victory.
When your equally famous wife lays waste to that manicured image with an album full of personal, musical and political fire, continuing with the old way of doing things is not an option. But when you’ve been reigning for a while, it can come to seem despotic, ungenerous, false. When you are on top, or racing there, this is an unimpeachable approach. No matter how high the stakes, he remained cold as ice. Complex emotions often formed the foundation of his tales of ascendancy, but his greatest talent was making his path seem smooth and inevitable. He absorbed the art of the boast, and built on that to create one of pop’s most fascinating characters: the street-corner hustler turned multimillionaire, slick and unbothered. As Jay prophetically raps on his new album, “niggas will rip your shit off Tidal just to spite you.When rapper self-mythologizing was in its infancy, Jay-Z was its most faithful student. When 4:44 goes wide next week, millions more will have easy access to the album, letting it rake in much more money than it would have if it sat forever as a frustrating Tidal exclusive. The rapper knows this-and it’s why his album is already available via internet-radio service iHeartRadio. Few people are likely to take out a new Tidal subscription just to listen to Jay’s new music. The company-though worth 10 times its original value, thanks to Jay-Z’s savvy strategizing-has said goodbye to multiple CEOs and is quickly losing its gleam in the eyes of music fans and potential buyers alike. Tidal itself isn’t in too great a position. Frank Ocean even gamed the idea of exclusives in November when he released one album to finish out his label contract and a second, hugely successful surprise album he owned as an exclusive on Apple Music, causing his label to ban artist exclusivity contracts in the future. In 2016, Beyoncé’s exclusive Lemonade drop led to rampant piracy, and Kanye’s The Life of Pablo, which started as a Tidal exclusive but later wandered its way to rival streaming services, drew a lawsuit from users complaining that Tidal tricked them into signing up for subscriptions under false pretenses. The biggest reason is that they just backfire. Fom a business perspective, giving 4:44 an eventual wide release is only smart.