I've noticed black men have focused primarily on the economic principles that Jay-Z raps about, while black women have more often focused on the meaning of his confession and the way his mistreatment of Beyoncé mirrors black women’s more general struggles with black men. In the aftermath of the album’s release, there have been a profusion of thinkpieces from black men and women grappling with the implications of Jay-Z’s confessions. Jay says that this process of tearing down and rebuilding is the hardest thing he’s ever done, even more difficult than enduring the violence of being shot at during his infamous days as a drug dealer in Brooklyn. In it, Jay-Z confesses to building a relationship with Beyoncé that was like a "big mansion with cracks in it." To stay together, they had to tear down this metaphoric mansion and rebuild all over again. The continual refrain on the song "4:44" is "I apologize." In a follow-up mini-documentary called Footnotes to 4:44, he assembles an all-star cast of black men including Will Smith, Chris Rock, Anthony Anderson, Kendrick Lamar, Omari Hardwick, and others to talk about black male vulnerability. Like any good apology, he fully owns his shit.
#BUY JAY Z 444 ALBUM FULL#
On 4:44, Jay-Z takes off the mask of black male impenetrability by taking full responsibility for the near-dissolution of his marriage to Beyoncé, the greatest cultural icon of this generation. Jay-Z’s songs "Big Pimpin," and "Girls, Girls, Girls," are only two tracks from his voluminous catalogue that make these themes clear. At the same time that hip-hop gave black men a voice about the ways that they struggled to participate in the patriarchal fantasy mentioned above, it also perpetuated the worst versions of toxic masculinity, styling black men as emotionally unavailable, violent, hypersexed, immature, and inflexible. All of these expectations about proper performances of femininity and masculinity - about men as providers and women as recipients of that provision - are deeply shaped not only by the lingering effects of racism, but by the sexism that pervades American culture. The entirety of the chorus and the back-and-forth between him and female emcee Amil on this track is a battle where the men dismiss women who want them for their money and the women dismiss men who don’t have any. For instance, one of Jay-Z’s earliest hits, "Can I Get A?", plays out black intimate anxiety over money. Since the late 1970s, hip-hop music and culture has been a primary place that Generation X and Millennial black people have worked out their relational expectations and anxieties about how men and women are supposed to act in romantic relationships. There is also the trauma of dealing with housing, food, job insecurity, and neighborhood violence that plague many black folks. Think about how hard it is to find love and make a relationship work when you don’t have the added pressure of trying to be a representative of your race or trying not to perpetuate racial stereotypes of your people as romantically unstable, promiscuous, and prone to broken families. Shaped by racism and its multigenerational assault on black families, black people often have had steep mountains to climb to find our way to each other. But we grow up in a world that says we are. This is not because black people are more broken or more pathological than any other group. Black men’s apologies to black women matter.
![buy jay z 444 album buy jay z 444 album](https://d.newsweek.com/en/full/627546/jay-z-444.jpg)
No stranger to heartbreak at the hands of black men, I, for one, found the apology to be a breath of fresh air. On 4:44’s eponymous track, Jay apologizes to Beyoncé and all the women he’s hurt because of his immaturity. On the album, Bey opened up about her struggles with her husband Jay-Z’s infidelity, her father’s infidelity to her mother, and how impossible it is to try to convince a man who’s treating you wrong to love you right. By “ Lemonade moment,” I’m referring to the cultural reckoning that Beyoncé made possible with the April 2016 release of her hit album Lemonade.
![buy jay z 444 album buy jay z 444 album](https://64.media.tumblr.com/2241a91ce06ea1a7d391ada192ad53bc/tumblr_oxsxrd2rLr1utpxsxo1_1280.png)
Black men of the Hip-Hop Generation are having their “ Lemonade moment” after the release of Jay-Z’s album 4:44 two weeks ago.