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Jay Z strips down, bares all on cathartic new disc

Album cover for Jay Z's "4:44"
Album cover for Jay Z's "4:44"

A- Jay Z

4:44

Roc Nation

photo

Democrat-Gazette file photo

Beyonce and Jay-Z attended game seven of the National Basketball Association playoffs in April.

When rapper self-mythologizing was in its infancy, Jay Z was its most faithful student. 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. Complex emotions often formed the foundation of his tales of ascendancy, but his greatest talent was making his path seem smooth and inevitable. No matter how high the stakes, he remained cold as ice.

When you are on top, or racing there, this is an unimpeachable approach. But when you've been reigning for a while, it can come to seem despotic, ungenerous, false. When your equally famous wife lays waste to that manicured image with an album of personal, musical and political fire, continuing the old way of doing things is not an option. Evolve or disappear.

As an elder statesman -- 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. Only extreme emotional-spiritual catharsis or extreme stripped-down intimacy would make for a worthwhile comeback.

On the confidently vulnerable 4:44, his 13th studio album and first in four years, he has chosen both. Viewed from different angles, 4:44 is a long-simmering, eyes-downcast confession; the return of a rule-rewriting mastermind as a moralist and occasional scold.

It is also the first Jay Z album in a decade that doesn't pretend to be competing in the present moment. It is the sound of a 47-year-old aesthete working at his own pace, dismantling his facade and reminding himself of the natural poignancy that the bluster has been obscuring.

"I fall short of what I say I'm all about," he says on the title track, his apology to his wife, Beyonce, for the indiscretions that led her to publicly shame him. The album begins with "Kill Jay Z," an extended tsk-tsk to himself. "You can't heal what you never reveal," he raps. "You know you owe the truth/To all the youth that fell in love with Jay-Z."

And so the confessions, or certainly what appear to be confessions, pour out.

Yes, he cheated on Beyonce (the title track, among others); yes, he's tried therapy ("Smile"); yes, he stabbed executive Lance Rivera back in 1999 ("Kill Jay Z"); yes, his father's side of the family was darkened by abuse ("Legacy"); yes, his mother is gay, and was in the closet for decades ("Smile"); yes, he's fed up with Kanye West's scattershot antics ("Kill Jay Z," among others).

That is, assuming everything here is true, and not just the second installment of a multi-album musical novela in which he and his wife portray bitter lovers bound together by fate, fame and farce.

Jay Z has been this candid before, but never quite this naked. These aren't stories told to fortify a magisterial image but rather the exhale of a long-held breath.

In some plain narrative ways, 4:44 is a companion piece to Beyonce'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.

But the two albums also share an emphasis on black self-sufficiency -- on Lemonade, the argument was sociopolitical; here, it's largely financial. On "The Story of O.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). The kingpin is now just a vessel for tomorrow's dreams.

The whole of 4:44 was produced by No I.D., who produced much of Common's essential work. He prepared a sample-driven, skin-and-bones, slightly greasy palette for Jay Z to rap over. The relative sparseness makes it almost like an unplugged album, a kind of platonic raw course of rapper, producer, sample and beat.

Ornamentation has long served Jay Z well, so the lack of glamour here is striking. Part of the thrill has been how lustrously he paints the unattainable. That underneath it all is a man full of regret is obvious and, at times, a bit deflating. When he laments not investing in the now-redeveloped Brooklyn neighborhood Dumbo on "The Story of O.J.," it's not clever, just a gripe.

The qualities that made Jay Z one of rap's true savants were his sly wit and the way he threaded himself into the production -- few rappers have found more creative ways to disperse their syllables, and sounded tougher and less fatigued while doing it. The Jay Z of 4:44 isn't quite there. He has evolved from dazzling taunts to ruminations that are sometimes snappy and sometimes lumpy. When snappy, though, they're exhilarating, like the opening of "Caught Their Eyes," which has the snarl Jay Z arrived with fully formed on his 1996 debut album, Reasonable Doubt: "I survived reading guys like you/I'm surprised y'all think y'all can disguise y'all truths."

At this stage of his career, keeping up with the Migos would be a fool's task. He's a veteran, and it shows: On three songs, he's baffled about how the younger generation uses Instagram as a tool of exaggerated street theater. While the Jay Z of 10 years ago would have been improvising his way through Young Thug and Playboi Carti anti-flows both as an exercise in hubris and also competitive vim, there's none of that here.

Rather, he makes a strong case for artistically aging by drilling down to core principles. As albums of late-career reckoning go, 4:44 isn't quite Marvin Gaye or Frank Sinatra or Johnny Cash, but it's on the path. Uncomfortable truths unearthed, demons shouted down, process refined -- even when everything melts away, you can still be ice-cold.

Style on 07/11/2017

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