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The cultural and spiritual endowment of the people who came before me is immense and those riches alone have sustained me, but financially taking care of my family, now and in the future, really does keep me up at night. It may seem trivial, but that type of comfort spoke to the financial security that they’d inherited and it was inspiring. I never experienced that - we moved a whole lot - but friends of mine had families who penetrated society’s upper-mid echelons and they'd had the privilege of stability. I want my children to know what it’s like to come back home to the bedrooms they grew up in. May our ground stay fertile - and the Starbucks on Eastern Parkway wash away. With a very appropriate sample of Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy Me” and an angelic outro from falsetto-king The-Dream, JAY’s “Marcy Me” is a graceful sonic salute to his home borough of Brooklyn.
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Dedicated to the city’s southern borough, it's filled with quips about Old Brooklyn™ (“not the new shit that feels like a spoof”), blocks that are virtually unrecognizable to longtime locals yet are now hotspots for real estate agents (Myrtle, Nostrand), and allusions to today’s new school of rappers (“hold the Uzi vertical, let that thing smoke”). As systematic and white-people-serving gentrification continues its attempts to erase Brooklyn’s deeply rich black and brown history, “Marcy Me” serves as JAY-Z’s reminder that, 20 years later, he’s still from Marcy, son, and there still ain’t nothing nice here. “Live from Bedford-Stuyvesant, the livest one/ Representing BK to the fullest” is a Biggie line that can almost surely be engraved on the tombstone of any true Kings County lifer - and now JAY-Z has further immortalized it on the intro to this three-minute lyrical miracle from 4:44. Backed by Wonder’s harmonies, she recites, “Love who you love/ Because life isn't guaranteed/ Smile.” Gloria’s moment in the sun and out of the shadows feels not just honest, but a key to understanding how a family heals and grows overtime. More notably, he reveals that his mother recently came out as lesbian, a fact that she later confirms herself in a moving poem. "Love by itself is hollow." The same thinking - that love itself needs the attention, devotion, and reassessment that living things require - is evident all over 4:44, but gets a special viewpoint on “Smile.” Over a beat that chops up Wonder’s classic anthem, JAY-Z raps about the power of good memories and triumphing over his adversaries. "For love to be effective it has to be fed," he said of the song’s inspiration during an interview in 2015. Listen to JAY-Z’s new 4:44 album here if you haven’t already.On a grey winter’s day in New York, Stevie Wonder wrote the iconic “Love’s In Need Of Love Today,” moved by the presence of his pregnant wife and some heady thoughts about love. “I don’t even know what you woulda done / In the future, other niggas playin’ football with your son.” Meanwhile, in addition to Kanye, the iconic rapper looks to have went at Future too on “Kill Jay Z” referencing Future’s son playing with Ciara’s new husband, Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson. In addition, JAY-Z had a few more choice words to Kanye on “BAM” as well, referencing lyrics from the Life of Pablo song, “30 Hours” (“I hit the gym, all chest, no legs”) where JAY-Z raps, “Uh, niggas is skippin’ leg day just to run they mouth.” Well, here’s what it appears to be JAY-Z’s response to that: “I know people backstab you, I feel bad too / But this fuck everybody attitude ain’t natural / But you ain’t the same, this ain’t KumbaYe / But you got hurt because you did cool by ‘Ye / You gave him 20 million without thinkin’ / He gave you 20 minutes on stage, fuck was he thinkin’? / ‘Fuck wrong with everybody?’ is what you sayin’ / But if everybody’s crazy, you’re the one that’s insane.”