![]() Twitter said before noon on Friday that there had been more than 810,000 posts about Jay-Z and his album since it was released, plus another 230,000 about Beyoncé.Ĭoming in the wake of “Lemonade,” an ambitious multimedia project that was simultaneously Beyoncé’s most personal and most political work to date, “4:44” finds Jay-Z in a similar mode, weaving confessional and autobiographical songwriting with big-picture perspectives on black life in the United States. Already, the lyrics are being dissected and pored over across social media and beyond, as listeners try to decode which details come from the real lives of one of the most famous (and famously private) duos in entertainment. Whether the album leads to more Tidal subscribers or just more online piracy, it is sure to be a talker. In a statement, Jay-Z, who has pulled much of his catalog from rival streaming services, called the release strategy for “4:44” a “perfect storm of sharing music with fans.” Tidal, which trails in the streaming race dominated by Spotify and Apple Music, has relied largely on splashy exclusives from its artist partners to encourage sign-ups, making itself the first - and, in some cases, only - place to hear new music from Kanye West, Rihanna and Beyoncé, whose “Lemonade” has remained a Tidal exclusive since its release in April 2016. Holy Grail” in 2013 - features 10 intensely personal and provocative tracks that, yes, include a few references to the marriage-baring “Lemonade” album by his wife, Beyoncé, and the recent birth of their twins.Īs part of a deal with Sprint, the cellphone carrier, which bought a one-third stake in Tidal this year, “4:44” was made available only to those who had subscribed to Tidal before the album’s release, along with existing Sprint customers. The album - Jay-Z’s first since “Magna Carta. This veteran Brooklyn rapper, 47, ended weeks of speculation near midnight on Thursday, releasing “4:44,” his 13th studio album, as a digital exclusive on that streaming service, which he bought in 2015. But for now, his secrets are exclusive to Tidal. And forgive the pun, but there’s still no real blueprint for him: Past 50, a billionaire, married with children-not only capable of artistic growth (as he proved so eloquently on 2017’s 4:44), but also willing to embrace it.Jay-Z is back, and he is vulnerable. ![]() Even as he ascended to the executive suite-a move that not only rechristened rappers as the vertically integrated businessmen they already were, but also opened up new paths for black artists navigating corporate America-he remained stoic, a little ruthless, playful about a past that most might not have come back from.Īdd to it a dexterity on the mic-not to mention a deep, intuitive love for language-that helped bring rap out of the yes-yes-y’all era and into another in which MCs functioned as American griots, chroniclers of the black American experience whose chains flashed bright but whose words flashed even brighter. ![]() Jay-Z (born in 1969) didn’t romanticize the streets (“Recruited lieutenants with ludicrous dreams of gettin’ cream/‘Let’s do this,’ it gets tedious”), but he never claimed remorse for them either. By the time he released 1996’s Reasonable Doubt, he said he was the oldest 26-year-old you’d ever want to meet. His childhood was violent: He started selling crack in his early teens and later quipped that getting a gun in Bed-Stuy was easier than getting public assistance. Growing up in central Brooklyn (“I’m from Marcy Houses, where the boys die by the thousand”), Shawn Carter wrote rhymes everywhere: standing at a streetlight, on the backs of brown-paper bags, banging out beats on his windowsill to find the rhythm. ![]()
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