He’s rapping better and going deeper than he was three years ago. Later that year, when Jay released “Spiritual” from the vaults (messaging around the release suggested he recorded it in 2014), it seemed like a sign that he was moving in that direction: Whatever Jay did or didn’t do, he clearly has lingering demons, as evidenced on “Jay Z Blue.” Is Hov ready to let us in? His new album might feel hollow if he doesn’t. Their marriage may have always been fine their marriage may have endured tumult thanks to him only to come out on the other side. Now, his wife has put the ball in his court to match her by making his rawest, most intimate work to date.

After Lemonade dropped, I posited that Beyonce set the stage for Jay to meet her halfway with a project equally intimate: I’d goes as far to say that post-retirement Hov is at his most potent when he gets introspective. Maturity and, subsequently, fatherhood, have increased the degree to which Jay Z gets more open in the booth. “Spiritual,” released during the week last summer when Alton Sterling and Philando Castile were killed by police, is quite possibly the most personal song yet from an artist whose career was, in some ways, predicated by keeping his emotional cards close to his bulletproof vest, peeling back layers on only a handful of songs per album. “Spiritual,” the most recent Jay Z solo song, features the line “We call her Blue cuz it’s sad that/How can I be a dad that, I never had that.” On American Gangster’s “Pray” he went back to fill in pieces of the story (“My papa just left the house/In search of the killer of my uncle Ray”) and on Watch the Throne’s “New Day” he voiced his fear that he’d inherit his father’s parenting style (“Promise to never leave him even if his mama tweakin/Cuz my dad left me and I promise never repeat him”). Why is this a big deal? For starters, the portion of the song we hear in the 30-second clip is somber and mellow, a far cry from rollout opening shots like “Change Clothes” or “I Just Wanna Love U.” Then there’s the lyrics: “Letter to my dad that I never wrote.” Shawn’s fraught relationship with his father is documented across his discography from the first song on his first album, “Can’t Knock the Hustle” (“My pops knew exactly what he did when he made me/Tried to get a nut, and he got a nut in-what”) to lashing out at him head-on in Dynasty’s searing “Where Have You Been?” (“Fuck you very much, you showed me the worst kind of pain”) to reconciling on The Black Album's “Moment of Clarity” (“So, Pop, I forgive you for all the shit that I lived through/It wasn’t all your fault, homie, you got caught…I’m just glad we got to see each other/Talk and re-meet each other”). The real jaw-dropper, though: one of the new songs is titled “Adnis,” as in Adnis Reeves, Jay’s father. And all it took was a thirty-second clip, a title, and like three-and-a-half bars, because for the most part, in the GOAT’s own words I “predicted this shit exactly.” Sort of.īut first, the new news: 4:44 is indeed a Jay Z album, and the “movie,” starring Academy Award winners Mahershala Ali, Lupita Nyong’o, and the respected vet the Academy has failed to recognize, Danny Glover, is likely some sort of accompanying visual.

I know where Jay Z (Jay:Z? JAY-Z?) is headed.

Song cry snippit jayz