Jay-Z's 4:44

The album begins with the self-destruction, or suicide, of our hero.

Kill Jay-Z;
They'll never love you, you'll never be enough,
let's just keep it real, Jay-Z;

Fuck Jay-Z, I mean you shot your own brother,
How could we know if we can trust Jay-Z?

The pause after "Kill Jay-Z", for someone who thought himself once as a god, is an imperative - it must happen, if I do it or someone else does. "Let's just keep it real, Jay-Z", as common a phrase as it is, is part of Jay's conversational powers: it undermines his authority, it attempts to speak directly to the truth of the matter. Alluding then to Jay-Z's shooting of his brother, it then lowers the moral authority of the character, putting him on a suspicious spiritual platform.

The hero struggles against a thousand swords - he is surrounded by public scrutinty, the demands of his family, betrayal by close associates, his own history and his potential future, and the conscience of his soul. He collapses and in "The Story of O.J." begins again from his basic identity as a man:

I told him, "Please don't die over the neighborhood
That your momma renting -
Take your drug money and buy the neighborhood,
That's how you rinse it."
...
I could've bought a place in Dumbo before it was Dumbo
For like two million.
That same building today is worth twenty-five million,
Guess how I'm feeling? Dumbo.

He then spits: "Financial freedom my only hope / Fuck living rich and dying broke / I bought some artwork for one million / Two years later, that shit worth two million / Few years later, that shit worth eight million / I can't wait to give this shit to my children." In these verses, he describes how, despite being "still [a] nigga", he brought himself up by acquiring wealth; at this crossroads in his life, he reflects on how acquiring wealth made him the person he is, who is a person he is not ashamed of, and is capable of helping his family and friends. His anger takes over, but it takes over on the behalf of people - he contemplates deeply on the power of wealth to ennoble other people. This theme continues on in "Smile", where people, namely his mother, is ennobled by honesty and acceptance - which are just as valuable as wealth.

"Caught Their Eyes" contemplates on the concept of death through Prince's death, which is in a way our hero contemplating on his own death. People are not meant to die; they go on as concepts. So he says: "I sat down with Prince, eye to eye / He told me his wishes before he died", before railing on the current holders of Prince's estate: "This guy had 'Slave' on his face / You think he wanted his masters with his masters? / You greedy bastards sold tickets to walk through his house / I'm surprised you ain't auction off the casket". This introduces one of the greater themes of the album: where our hero has all this material wealth now, there is no certainty that his legacy, the concept of him, the impact he has had on his community will live on after him. In fact, wealth can be used to disgrace its owner after their death, threatening to destroy any legacy.

This confronting of mortality brings him back to his present circumstances, focusing on another immortal concept: that of love in the title track. He tellingly begins his apology not referring to the one he loves, but their children: "I apologize, I often womanized / Took for my child to be born to see through a woman's eyes / Took for these natural twins to believe in miracles." Perhaps that can be seen as cowardly, not speaking directly to the person he is apologizing to, but I find in it an affirmation of their marriage: more than money, more than fame, more than other women, our relationship is defined by this union and the product of this union, which fits in thematically with "Smile" and "Caught Their Eyes". What follows is a surprisingly unarmored, and rational, rant on all his faults. I recall when I first listened to this track I rolled my eyes and thought, "Oh, the expected apology track." But on subsequent listens, thinking on the particular things he is saying, rather than saying simply "I was wrong and you're right and I love you", there is a logical breakdown of his apology. First is the invocation of family; the anecdote of their proposal and his relative immaturity; his acknowledgement of her feelings; his inability to stand up to the role model he perceives himself to be ("I fall short of what I say I'm all about"); the concept of time and happiness lost ("You stare blankly into space, thinking all the time you wasted / on all this basic shit"); the concept of, faced with losing meaning in life, dying alone (the famous line: "Not meant to cry and die alone in these mansions"); the concept of happiness as coming from an equal partner ("We're supposed to vacay 'til our backs burn / We're supposed to laugh 'til our hearts stop / And then meet in a space where the dark stops / And let love light the way"); the concept of man fundamentally as flawed ("Like the men before me, I cut off my nose to spite my face"); ending with our hero literally namedropping his daughter's name, Blue, and sounding genuinely hurt as a result of it, for bringing his daughter into the conversation seemed to really let him know he fucked up. Sure he doesn't get a pass for often mentioning he sucks at emotional matters, but, outside of our moral forgiveness of him, the lyrics themselves paint a detailed breakdown of this human being he has constructed and what human lives are supposed to be.

But his hanging his head is against the person he really is, and that his wife loves; and so he, in grieving over their broken connection in the previous song, describes what their relationship is in "Family Feud". "Super Bowl goals / My wife in the crib feeding the kids liquid gold / We in a whole different mode", he spits, becoming that other fictional character we have been rolling our eyes at for a decade: the steely, cruel, voracious mob boss. Yet here the author, Jay-Z, deserves it, as up to this point he has been painting this character in the brink of a life crisis where "other [men could be] playing football with [his] son". Our hero is not bragging about wealth generally; he is bragging about the particular wealth he and his wife own, which is reflective of their specific personalities and ethics. The latter is worth far more in weight than any of their actual gold. So he says:

A man that don't take care of his family can't be rich
I watched Godfather, I missed that whole shit
My consciousness was Michael's common sense
I missed the karma that came as a consequence.

"Bam" begins the album's final arc: having nearly lost everything, and reconciling with the person literally at the footsteps of his soul, he now focuses on using his reputation and wealth to help others like him. In "Bam" he playfully challenges other men to make something of themselves as he himself has. In "Moonlight" there is an examination of rap culture, which he accuses as stunted and tired:

We got the same fucking flows
I don't know who is who
We got the same fucking watch
She don't got time to choose
We stuck in La La Land
We got the same fucking moves

and

Look, I know killers, you no killer, huh?
Bathing Ape, maybe not a gorilla, huh?
Glorified seat filler, huh?
Stop walking around like you made Thriller, huh?

all said tongue-in-cheek. What our hero is critically saying is: I'm watching other, younger men, who are as talented as me and look just like me, destroy their lives as I nearly had.

He has a bit of introspection in "Marcy Me", reflecting on his formative, difficult childhood, and he finally ends the album on "Legacy", where he is ready to accept death after ensuring his family's happiness after he is gone.

Because of "4:44" I would call Jay-Z rap's first great storyteller. An odd thing to claim on first inspection, as rap from the beginning has been an anecdote-heavy style of songwriting, I would argue that style often came before story. Of rap's pantheon, no one has attempted an album a la "Blood on the Tracks"; where each track is meant to add upon the previous and can stand apart from that narrative; and whether the story as a whole, composed of excellent tracks, is more interesting than its constituents. This is the first time in rap where I've seen the main character is not one of bohemian, outcast, drifter - here Jay portrays the artist as someone who takes part in society, who does not scorn it. (I deliberately ignore "To Pimp A Butterfly", which I'm sure readers are shouting.) Jay finally humanizes the Eastwood-styled gangster by removing his armor, threatening him by reducing him to only wealth. What is distinct about his treatment, even apart from musical heroes of other genres, is that wealth is fundamental to this character; he has made a Red Headed Stranger, a Hurricane, of particularly modern cloth, out of the gangster archetype. In suggesting this I am not lowering other rappers, who have done other incredible things with the genre; but this achievement is worth pointing out alone. In this surprising way, Jay, early populist, then media mogul, then phony auteur, finally did stack up to the person he always said he's about: a visionary, a student of the Mona Lisa, and an artist, a very good one at that.