Jay-Z Spikes The ‘Lemonade’ – ‘4:44’ Lyrical Deep Dive Of The Best Songs
4:44 from Jay-Z dropped on Tidal this morning, and we finally received some closure on the Lemonade scandal.
First of all, yes, I always have looked up to Jay-Z and thought he was a “superhero” of the rap world. That’s just my generation, I guess. So when Jay-Z started to plug imagery for 4:44, I was super excited. After listening to the album, I think that if you’re not aware of the back story of the Lemonade album, this album is going to confuse you. After a second, third, and fourth listen, I found that this isn’t going to be an album of “singles,” and it’s definitely not an album for the average rap fan. There’s a certain level of intelligence that HOV reaches that isn’t going to be generic enough to please the masses – but it is the best attempt at a pairing to Beyonce‘s visual offering.
Check out (probably) the deepest dive on Jay-Z’s 13th studio album, song by song on our favorite 4:44‘s tracks below. We didn’t cover every track on the album, but most of the tracks had some great Easter eggs. Check it out by clicking to the next page to see each deep dive of the songs.
“4:44”
Stand Out Lyrics: THE WHOLE SONG.
Jay spills his guts, sharing his thoughts between the birth of his kids, and what it takes for a woman to bear children. He notes that he begged Bey to talk to him after she left and that she matured faster than him since she was 21. He notes that he “wasn’t ready,” and that he apologized because he didn’t deserve her. He says that he toyed with her emotions with other women during their relationship because he was “emotionless.” He also says a very poetic line “Your eyes leave with the soul that your body once housed, and you stare blankly into space, thinkin’ of all the time you wasted in on all this basic s***.” We’re pretty sure this correlates with her moment of “Today I regret the night I put that ring on,” and we’re guessing that he means that it was so painful to watch her lose all her happiness.
The second verse expresses that he feels that their love was supposed to be “for the ages,” and they weren’t “meant to cry and die alone in these mansions or sleep with our backs turned.” He also says that he “never wanted another woman to know something about me that you didn’t know.” We suspect when he wrote these verses, Bey might have still been gone, because he ends it with “I will be emotionally available if I invited you over? I stew over. What if? You over? My s***?” It sounded like he knew it was a big possibility he could lose her.
He also shares that it’s going to wreck him once his kids find out what he did when they’re older. And that his infidelity happened again after Blue was already conceived. “‘You did what with who?’ What good is a ménage à trois when you have a soulmate? ‘You risked that for Blue?'”
Thank goodness they straightened all of it out.
