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The last time we heard from Jay, it was 2013’s Magna Carta Holy Grail, a miscalculated mess that drowned itself in syrupy guest-hooks and sleepy mogul-talk. And it’s the best thing he’s done in many years.
Jay z 444 album steam free#
In 4:44, Jay has made an album utterly free of commercial consideration, one without a single track for the club or the radio or whatever audience Jay had in mind when he made “Change Clothes.” He’s made a short, compact, soulful, emotionally soul-baring internal journey of an album. But now we know how this Jay - the 47-year-old, richer-than-fuck Jay - sounds when numbers are no longer a consideration. We’ll never know how that Jay would’ve sounded without any commercial pressure. It also raised questions: How might a Jay-Z album sound if Jay didn’t have to worry about commercial considerations? Jay had his own ideas - how if lyrics sold, truth be told, he’d probably be lyrically Talib Kweli - but that never sounded quite right.
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And here he was, saying that what we’d been hearing all these years was the watered-down, altered-for-consumption version of himself. Jay was, if not the best rapper working at the time, at least top three. At the time, it was a remarkable admission. “I dumbed down for the audience to double my dollars.” That was Jay-Z 14 years ago, just before his fake retirement.