I think that's everyday attire for him breh
JAY-Z ~ 4:44 (Discussion Thread)
- Thread starter MollyGalaga
- Start date
Did you see the video of Frank serenading Brad Pitt last night?
ISO
Pass me the rock nikka
He's actually only one year older than JayDude is almost 60 dresses like that
666 ReVeNGe 666
TROLL IS LIFE
No I need that breh
Interesting take 
Jay-Z and the Politics of Rapping in Middle Age
At 47, Jay-Z thinks about where he’s been, where he’s going and what he’s leaving behind. It’s all there on his latest album, “4:44.”
By WESLEY MORRISJULY 19, 2017
Jay-Z, circa 1995. The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
“Old school” still has some currency in hip-hop. It nods to forebears, styles and history. “Old” is a different story. “Old” means you’re past your prime. It means you have nothing new to say — and even if you did, who would want to listen? “Old” means maybe you know what’s new, but you want to do it the way you’ve always done it. So “old” also means fixed, settled, stuck.
By those standards, Jay-Z, at 47, might seem old. Standards are presumptuous, though, because, really, what do we know about “old” rappers? Only that they don’t rap as much as they used to. I mean, they’re still around — but as part of back-patting nostalgia (in concert or on HBO) or hosting the Grammys or cooking with Martha Stewart. Maybe they’ve still got it. But vital new music is secondary at best.
Despite a lot of lucrative distractions, Jay-Z is still a rapper, whose voice, apparently, still matters. “Apparently,” because I didn’t expect much from “4:44,” his 13th solo (or solo-ish) record that arrived, as heavily advertised, at the end of June.
But it’s better than good: a gorgeously produced stab at self-examination (it runs less than the length of a standard therapy session) that suggests a new direction for rap’s elder statesmen. It also demonstrates a way that certain black artists can reckon with middle age — by accepting the emotionalism, humor and self-criticism that come naturally to a current generation of younger rappers.
Anybody irritated by the posturing of Jay-Z’s previous album, “Magna Carta: Holy Grail” (2013), was likely put off by the prospect of more. If a major rapper arrives at his mid-40s and wants to give us a song that mentions fine wines and a serial-killer drug dealer, then drops the name of a fashion-designer-movie-director more than a dozen times (“Tom Ford”), maybe he should be hosting the Grammys, too.
It’s entirely possible that Jay-Z arrived to record “Magna Carta” aware that there’s not much of a road map for a rapper in his 40s, especially one whose body of work and reputation are great enough to haunt him. His clever, brash, kaleidoscopically grim 1996 debut, “Reasonable Doubt,” is as much a work of memoir of life in the street-level drug trade as it is an album.
On it, he raps with the impunity of a mafia don. It’s a distinction that’s always kept him seeming a little older than everybody else, while, eventually, holding his competitors’ youth against them. On songs like “Change Clothes,” with Pharrell, from 2003, and “Off That,” with a young-and-hungry Drake, from 2009, he was all too happy to display a cranky old-soul impatience, arguing that because he thinks he is grown up, his peers should, too.
“Y’all [epithet] acting way too tough/Throw on a suit, and get it tapered up,” he implored on “Change Clothes.”
But eventually that sense of superiority came to sound like an exercise. Rap is a language art, and no matter your age, you need something to say. The problem with “Magna Carta” wasn’t that Jay-Z was too old. It is that he sounded bored. The music was disconnected from life, and his materialism sounded passé even for hip-hop. Fashion, art, love, even philanthropy were spiked with a testy self-consciousness. The whole thing reeked of midlife crisis.
Jay-Z and Beyoncé with their daughter Blue Ivy in February. Kevin Mazur/Getty Images
“4:44” sounds like a consequence of that crisis. Maybe Jay-Z was bored in his 40s. Maybe he cheated on his wife, Beyoncé. He bought expensive stuff and maybe needed to brag about it. Maybe he was as skeptical and uncertain as we were about what such a person should be rapping about.
Then Beyoncé released “Lemonade,” and more or less told him. It arrived in the spring of 2016 and announced to the world that his sense of risk — as a former drug dealer, an entrepreneur and a womanizer — has a cost: her love.
It’s believable that Jay-Z really had run out of fresh ideas. But if he were going to keep making new records, “Lemonade” demanded at least a partial response to Beyoncé’s agony and the scope of her artistry.
The resulting album isn’t trying to match either. “Lemonade” is a fully processed, entirely emotional performance. “4:44” is Tony Soprano at his first couple of sessions with Dr. Melfi. He’s not totally sure why he’s here and is occasionally petty about it. Jay-Z acknowledges the pain he caused without entirely agreeing to own it.
It’s the production, by the longtime hip-hop and R&B producer No I. D., that most gives the album its psychology. He puts samples by the Alan Parsons Project, Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, the Clark Sisters and Hannah Williams & the Affirmations to masterly use. Where Jay-Z is inclined to be passive, the music insinuates. It makes him seem more culpable, vulnerable, spiritual and transparent than he might even realize. No I. D. is a studio wizard. He’s also Dr. Melfi.
Jay-Z’s old creative and sexual promiscuity have been replaced by an act of commitment. No more women, just his wife. No more gluts of great producers, just this one. These are the new risks for him: monogamy, focus, trust. There are new existential concerns, too. The ambition here extends from his own plight to the straits of black people all over America. Nothing like a coherent thesis emerges, but he’s feeling his way toward if not a moral capitalism then the idea of who capitalism is for.
Jay-Z began his career talking about all the money he had and how he made it. Now, he’s aged into a man with time to think about what the money means, what else it can do. He has become wealthy, and wealth is money with dimension, vision and heirs.
Every time I’m reading a magazine and see one of those ads for a Patek Philippe watch, I take a second to wonder about the meaning of wealth. (This is a timepiece you take out a mortgage for.) The ads usually feature two or three generations of handsome white people, and the tag line is something obnoxiously poignant, like “You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation.”
Jay-Z in 2007. Damon Winter/The New York Times
It’s a mission statement about legacy and affluence that’s rarely mentioned in rap, which is sometimes pathologically obsessed with the optics of spending. Saving never comes up. Neither does nonmusical posterity. To be fair, what’s sexy about those?
Promiscuity is a rap subject. Paternity, not so much. Young men, understandably, aren’t too concerned with the future. New money tends to burn holes in pockets. Putting something away, having something to hand down, those tend to be old-person concerns. Certainly, other rappers have wills. But Jay-Z is actually ruminating about his. He’s wondering, too, whether your money’s doing all it can.
On “4:44,” he gets churlish about that. In “The Story of O. J.,” he asks and answers, “You know what’s more important than spending money in a strip club? Credit.”
A line later, he is asking, regrettably, if we know why the Jews own all the property in America. His phrasing perpetuates one stereotype to emphasize another about black people and capital — that, compared with white people, they have none. His pointing this out at 47 requires you to know what he was like when he was 27, when the gentleman at the club was him.
Beyoncé and Jay-Z at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey in 2016. Larry Busacca/PW/WireImage, via Getty Images
Some of the risk of being an old rapper is that the old posturing won’t do. You actually have to stand for something. Jay-Z also has to reckon with where he has stood — with the Obamas on one hand but also cavalierly against womankind on the other. What does he make of his track record, his history, say, with women, and what will his children make of that?
Maybe this is why young rappers don’t rap old. The evolving nature of maturity can make you seem like a hypocrite.
This idea of legacy becomes a halting socioeconomic lecture on “4:44.” He’s working hard for his estate so that death won’t leave a hole. It will leave a whole. This is an ultrapractical view of the end of life that testifies to the sort of bootstrap conservatism that argues that because one black person has overcome the systemic and self-inflicted roadblocks to success, anyone can. These are his rags-to-riches racial politics. He’s made his black life matter, so should you.
The emotional twist on “4:44” is that despite years of his rapping about the empire he’s built, he didn’t know its value until he almost lost the woman who helped build it. Maybe he was being too much of a man to notice. Not long after the album’s release, Jay-Z put out an awkwardly short companion video in which famous black men (and Aziz Ansari) discuss being lovers and fathers and living at an emotional disadvantage in relationships with women. It’s fascinating but also probably beside the point of his adultery. The video’s point is: We black men can talk about the difficulties of being black men. We can emote!
You saw something like that a couple of weeks ago on an episode of “The Bachelorette” when a suitor — one of the very last — named Eric sincerely warns Rachel that his life in Baltimore isn’t as posh as in some of the show’s European locations or as stable as those of the white men he is up against. Eric started as a cutup. But we are supposed to believe that Rachel has grown him up. And so his moving admission of mere circumstantial inferiority (he’s poor) was meant to enhance his worth as a man.
The beauty of Barry Jenkins’s romance “Moonlight” — some of it, anyway — is the way it didn’t have to work half as hard to let you see deep inside a character who over time graduates from impressionable child to impenetrable adult thug. You never lose sight of the emotional void that he winds up driving half the night to fill.
As popular culture archetypes, these used to be scary black men. But every once in a while, they’re granted a humanity that, with old-school rappers, is harder to come by. It’s not an art form that forgives weakness, concession or blame. It runs on burnishing and destroying egos. It thrives on the performance of flawless maximal authenticity and lyrical supremacy. Jay-Z doesn’t relinquish his ego on “4:44.” But on “Kill Jay-Z,” the rueful opening song, he contemplates the downsides of having such a strong one: “Die Jay-Z, this ain’t back in the days/You don’t need an alibi, Jay-Z/Cry Jay-Z, we know the pain is real/But you can’t heal what you never reveal.”
This is Jay-Z driving half the night, to some place we’ve never seen him go, perhaps to some place he’s never even been. But part of maturity — whether or not you’re a rapper — is being human enough to accept that the first step is getting in the car.
Jay-Z and the Politics of Rapping in Middle Age
At 47, Jay-Z thinks about where he’s been, where he’s going and what he’s leaving behind. It’s all there on his latest album, “4:44.”
By WESLEY MORRISJULY 19, 2017
Jay-Z, circa 1995. The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
“Old school” still has some currency in hip-hop. It nods to forebears, styles and history. “Old” is a different story. “Old” means you’re past your prime. It means you have nothing new to say — and even if you did, who would want to listen? “Old” means maybe you know what’s new, but you want to do it the way you’ve always done it. So “old” also means fixed, settled, stuck.
By those standards, Jay-Z, at 47, might seem old. Standards are presumptuous, though, because, really, what do we know about “old” rappers? Only that they don’t rap as much as they used to. I mean, they’re still around — but as part of back-patting nostalgia (in concert or on HBO) or hosting the Grammys or cooking with Martha Stewart. Maybe they’ve still got it. But vital new music is secondary at best.
Despite a lot of lucrative distractions, Jay-Z is still a rapper, whose voice, apparently, still matters. “Apparently,” because I didn’t expect much from “4:44,” his 13th solo (or solo-ish) record that arrived, as heavily advertised, at the end of June.
But it’s better than good: a gorgeously produced stab at self-examination (it runs less than the length of a standard therapy session) that suggests a new direction for rap’s elder statesmen. It also demonstrates a way that certain black artists can reckon with middle age — by accepting the emotionalism, humor and self-criticism that come naturally to a current generation of younger rappers.
Anybody irritated by the posturing of Jay-Z’s previous album, “Magna Carta: Holy Grail” (2013), was likely put off by the prospect of more. If a major rapper arrives at his mid-40s and wants to give us a song that mentions fine wines and a serial-killer drug dealer, then drops the name of a fashion-designer-movie-director more than a dozen times (“Tom Ford”), maybe he should be hosting the Grammys, too.
It’s entirely possible that Jay-Z arrived to record “Magna Carta” aware that there’s not much of a road map for a rapper in his 40s, especially one whose body of work and reputation are great enough to haunt him. His clever, brash, kaleidoscopically grim 1996 debut, “Reasonable Doubt,” is as much a work of memoir of life in the street-level drug trade as it is an album.
On it, he raps with the impunity of a mafia don. It’s a distinction that’s always kept him seeming a little older than everybody else, while, eventually, holding his competitors’ youth against them. On songs like “Change Clothes,” with Pharrell, from 2003, and “Off That,” with a young-and-hungry Drake, from 2009, he was all too happy to display a cranky old-soul impatience, arguing that because he thinks he is grown up, his peers should, too.
“Y’all [epithet] acting way too tough/Throw on a suit, and get it tapered up,” he implored on “Change Clothes.”
But eventually that sense of superiority came to sound like an exercise. Rap is a language art, and no matter your age, you need something to say. The problem with “Magna Carta” wasn’t that Jay-Z was too old. It is that he sounded bored. The music was disconnected from life, and his materialism sounded passé even for hip-hop. Fashion, art, love, even philanthropy were spiked with a testy self-consciousness. The whole thing reeked of midlife crisis.
Jay-Z and Beyoncé with their daughter Blue Ivy in February. Kevin Mazur/Getty Images
“4:44” sounds like a consequence of that crisis. Maybe Jay-Z was bored in his 40s. Maybe he cheated on his wife, Beyoncé. He bought expensive stuff and maybe needed to brag about it. Maybe he was as skeptical and uncertain as we were about what such a person should be rapping about.
Then Beyoncé released “Lemonade,” and more or less told him. It arrived in the spring of 2016 and announced to the world that his sense of risk — as a former drug dealer, an entrepreneur and a womanizer — has a cost: her love.
It’s believable that Jay-Z really had run out of fresh ideas. But if he were going to keep making new records, “Lemonade” demanded at least a partial response to Beyoncé’s agony and the scope of her artistry.
The resulting album isn’t trying to match either. “Lemonade” is a fully processed, entirely emotional performance. “4:44” is Tony Soprano at his first couple of sessions with Dr. Melfi. He’s not totally sure why he’s here and is occasionally petty about it. Jay-Z acknowledges the pain he caused without entirely agreeing to own it.
It’s the production, by the longtime hip-hop and R&B producer No I. D., that most gives the album its psychology. He puts samples by the Alan Parsons Project, Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, the Clark Sisters and Hannah Williams & the Affirmations to masterly use. Where Jay-Z is inclined to be passive, the music insinuates. It makes him seem more culpable, vulnerable, spiritual and transparent than he might even realize. No I. D. is a studio wizard. He’s also Dr. Melfi.
Jay-Z’s old creative and sexual promiscuity have been replaced by an act of commitment. No more women, just his wife. No more gluts of great producers, just this one. These are the new risks for him: monogamy, focus, trust. There are new existential concerns, too. The ambition here extends from his own plight to the straits of black people all over America. Nothing like a coherent thesis emerges, but he’s feeling his way toward if not a moral capitalism then the idea of who capitalism is for.
Jay-Z began his career talking about all the money he had and how he made it. Now, he’s aged into a man with time to think about what the money means, what else it can do. He has become wealthy, and wealth is money with dimension, vision and heirs.
Every time I’m reading a magazine and see one of those ads for a Patek Philippe watch, I take a second to wonder about the meaning of wealth. (This is a timepiece you take out a mortgage for.) The ads usually feature two or three generations of handsome white people, and the tag line is something obnoxiously poignant, like “You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation.”
Jay-Z in 2007. Damon Winter/The New York Times
It’s a mission statement about legacy and affluence that’s rarely mentioned in rap, which is sometimes pathologically obsessed with the optics of spending. Saving never comes up. Neither does nonmusical posterity. To be fair, what’s sexy about those?
Promiscuity is a rap subject. Paternity, not so much. Young men, understandably, aren’t too concerned with the future. New money tends to burn holes in pockets. Putting something away, having something to hand down, those tend to be old-person concerns. Certainly, other rappers have wills. But Jay-Z is actually ruminating about his. He’s wondering, too, whether your money’s doing all it can.
On “4:44,” he gets churlish about that. In “The Story of O. J.,” he asks and answers, “You know what’s more important than spending money in a strip club? Credit.”
A line later, he is asking, regrettably, if we know why the Jews own all the property in America. His phrasing perpetuates one stereotype to emphasize another about black people and capital — that, compared with white people, they have none. His pointing this out at 47 requires you to know what he was like when he was 27, when the gentleman at the club was him.
Beyoncé and Jay-Z at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey in 2016. Larry Busacca/PW/WireImage, via Getty Images
Some of the risk of being an old rapper is that the old posturing won’t do. You actually have to stand for something. Jay-Z also has to reckon with where he has stood — with the Obamas on one hand but also cavalierly against womankind on the other. What does he make of his track record, his history, say, with women, and what will his children make of that?
Maybe this is why young rappers don’t rap old. The evolving nature of maturity can make you seem like a hypocrite.
This idea of legacy becomes a halting socioeconomic lecture on “4:44.” He’s working hard for his estate so that death won’t leave a hole. It will leave a whole. This is an ultrapractical view of the end of life that testifies to the sort of bootstrap conservatism that argues that because one black person has overcome the systemic and self-inflicted roadblocks to success, anyone can. These are his rags-to-riches racial politics. He’s made his black life matter, so should you.
The emotional twist on “4:44” is that despite years of his rapping about the empire he’s built, he didn’t know its value until he almost lost the woman who helped build it. Maybe he was being too much of a man to notice. Not long after the album’s release, Jay-Z put out an awkwardly short companion video in which famous black men (and Aziz Ansari) discuss being lovers and fathers and living at an emotional disadvantage in relationships with women. It’s fascinating but also probably beside the point of his adultery. The video’s point is: We black men can talk about the difficulties of being black men. We can emote!
You saw something like that a couple of weeks ago on an episode of “The Bachelorette” when a suitor — one of the very last — named Eric sincerely warns Rachel that his life in Baltimore isn’t as posh as in some of the show’s European locations or as stable as those of the white men he is up against. Eric started as a cutup. But we are supposed to believe that Rachel has grown him up. And so his moving admission of mere circumstantial inferiority (he’s poor) was meant to enhance his worth as a man.
The beauty of Barry Jenkins’s romance “Moonlight” — some of it, anyway — is the way it didn’t have to work half as hard to let you see deep inside a character who over time graduates from impressionable child to impenetrable adult thug. You never lose sight of the emotional void that he winds up driving half the night to fill.
As popular culture archetypes, these used to be scary black men. But every once in a while, they’re granted a humanity that, with old-school rappers, is harder to come by. It’s not an art form that forgives weakness, concession or blame. It runs on burnishing and destroying egos. It thrives on the performance of flawless maximal authenticity and lyrical supremacy. Jay-Z doesn’t relinquish his ego on “4:44.” But on “Kill Jay-Z,” the rueful opening song, he contemplates the downsides of having such a strong one: “Die Jay-Z, this ain’t back in the days/You don’t need an alibi, Jay-Z/Cry Jay-Z, we know the pain is real/But you can’t heal what you never reveal.”
This is Jay-Z driving half the night, to some place we’ve never seen him go, perhaps to some place he’s never even been. But part of maturity — whether or not you’re a rapper — is being human enough to accept that the first step is getting in the car.
I love it whether it's good or bad. This album is getting dissected like none other
Finally copped the physical but the mix / master is still a bit muddier than I'd hoped. 4:44 sounds terrible sonically, vocals sound like they're on top of the beat, not a part of it. Couple that with the loud vocal sample, makes it hard to listen too.
A couple of tracks where there's random background sample or sounds that add nothing to the track but come through loud as hell.
Who mixed and mastered this album? There were no credits in the booklet just a bunch of photos. Overall still a dope ass album though and one that I'll be rocking with for a while.
The beat switch on that last bonus track
A couple of tracks where there's random background sample or sounds that add nothing to the track but come through loud as hell.
Who mixed and mastered this album? There were no credits in the booklet just a bunch of photos. Overall still a dope ass album though and one that I'll be rocking with for a while.
The beat switch on that last bonus track
Go HAM
At your best your are love
I've lost all interest in listening to this album again.
It's boring.
It's boring.
I've lost all interest in listening to this album again.
It's boring.
at coming in to the thread just to hate.
You saw jay z all the time? Duck talesI dig Marcy Me most but I find it ironic that he's shouting out Old BK and "not this new shyt" when it was JAY who allowed himself to be the face of the Barclays Center project which ushered out old Brooklyn for this new Brooklyn gentrification shyt.
Yet when it was the groundbreaking ceremony at Brooklyn Borough Hall and all of the developers, nets ownership and others were there...not a near mention of his name in those two hours.
He was used as the guy to "calm the natives" aka the locals aka my Brooklyn...his so called Brooklyn.
This picture below he took was from his old crib on State Street I used to see him at all the time.
I had some close friends lose businesses in that area because they couldn't afford it anymore. There are hardly any more black businesses in that area.
Don't shout out our old borough when you played a role in creating "this new shyt" you're running from.
I'll never forgive him for that shyt.
the artist known az
Hail the victors
Footnotes for Kill Jay-Z up on Tidal...Adnis is the new video on Fri