Jay-Z has built a career on being a tough business man who's great at talking slick to girls, loving to spend lavishly on designer brands and champagne and he can outrap almost anyone, and not only does he know it - he lets it be known. And what's great is that the music in itself does so much in telling that very same story. From the first track "Killing JAY-Z" to the final song "Legacy" Jay-Z is telling the story of where he is at today, and it's brutally honest at the same time as it's packed with slick lines that I already noticed went straight over fuckers heads. It reminds me of classic albums from the late '80s where an album was treated as a body of work that was being worked equally hard on by both the artist and the producer to sound like a body of work that could stand on its own. "4:44" is entirely focused both from a lyrical and a sonic perspective and the two mesh exceptionally well. With one of the best emcees in the game meeting one of the best producers of the industry, NO ID and Hov has created an album that brings back the values of what a really great Hip Hop album could and should be. I loved "American Gangster" so I'm a bit on the fence on which album is better but this is more focused and the lyrics is just on another level, totally original from the JAY-Z we know.
In fact this might be one of the Hov album that will go down as one of his best, a future classic alongside "Reasonable Doubt", "Blueprint" and "The Black Album". Last week out of nowhere JAY-Z dropped his thirteenth studio album pretty much out of nowhere no promotion, no hype, just 37 minutes of fantastic music.
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