What's more JAY-Z actually references the elevator kerfuffle on the 4:44 track "Kill JAY-Z." "You egged Solange on/Knowin' all along, all you had to say you was wrong," he raps in the song, a reference widely interpreted, within the larger context of the song, as a acknowledgement that he was not always faithful in his marriage. (The listed address of the hotel itself, though, is 848 Washington Street, but Solange is known to hang out at the club with the 444 address, Le Bain.) According to Entertainment Tonight, 444 West 13th Street is the address of the club at the top of a Manhattan hotel called the Standard. I AM SHOOK."Ĭould it be? Could it be that JAY-Z would name use the title of his latest album to give a shoutout to the notorious elevator incident of 2014, leaked surveillance video of which showed Beyoncé's sister, Solange, pummeling JAY as Bey silently watched? Friends, I so, so want this to be true.Īnd the theory seems to hold up. "I'm at The Standard where Solange beat Jay-Z's a** in the elevator," he posted, along with a photo of the address. It's the title track because it's such a powerful song, and I just believe one of the best songs I've ever written.īut then a Twitter user named Stephen Ossola visited a significant site in the Knowles-Carter story, and everything changed. So it became the title of the album and everything. I woke up, literally, at 4:44 in the morning, 4:44 a.m., to write this song. It may have seemed as though the mystery was solved when JAY told iHeartRadio the origin story of 4:44, which doubles as the name of an album track, way back when the album first came out.
And thank God for that, because this theory about the meaning of JAY-Z's 4:44 will have you freaking out. And more than a month and lots of new intel later, that curiosity persists. But most of all, fans were desperate to know how the album got its name. They speculated about whether he'd respond to wife Beyoncé's depiction of his cheating ways in her 2016 visual album Lemonade (he did) They ravenously anticipated some mention of the twins the couple had welcomed earlier that month (Mr. I would have music in his email before he got to the treadmill.”Ĭonsidered by spiritualists as an angelic sign of awakening, the time 4:44 is not only the album’s title track, but also the exact length of the song, which Dion said was a happy accident.Fans were going bananas during the run-up to the release of JAY-Z's 4:44 on June 30. “Jay-Z would go to the treadmill in the early morning. And it just ended up just turning into the first song. The funny thing is I had originally brought it to him as a concept for the entire album. Knowing Jay-Z liked to leap into a song the first thing in the early morning, and being a savvy songwriter, Dion ensured that the timing was right, and that there was always new music ready for him while awakening in the morning. Kill JAY-Z This was the first song we recorded. “ left the studio immediately,” he said, “woke up the next day at 4:44 in the morning and started writing the words.” Jay-Z “Then I played it for him, looked at him and said, `So, what are you gonna do now?’ “That inspired me to make the music exactly as you hear it,” he said. Inspired by this direction, he immediately crafted a track. Making the music honest was the goal: “That was the theme: what is necessary to live a good life.” “My job is to see something in him, and then provoke it to come out with music.” “I view songwriting with Jay-Z like scoring a movie,” said No ID. If moved by these tracks, Jay-Z gets to work, and starts writing the words. To this he added his own music and more, all with the mission of inspiring Jay-Z to express himself more openly than ever before. No ID, the architect of every beat and wizard of sonics, created a crazyqulit of samples from records by The Fugees, Stevie Wonder and Nini Simone. It’s the title track because it’s such a powerful song, and I just believe one of the best songs I’ve ever written.” And I woke up, literally, at 4:44 in the morning, 4:44 am, to write this song. “‘4:44’ is a song that I wrote,’ he said, “and it’s the crux of the album, just right in the middle of the album. He wanted to answer Beyonce’s songs about the problems in their marriage.
The song emerged after Jay told No ID (the Chicago producer-writer Dion Wilson) that he wanted to write songs about things he’d never talked about before. The first single from his 13th album of the same name, released in 2017, the song “4:44” is exactly 4:44 in length. Frank Ocean) 05 444 06 Family Feud 07 Bam (feat. Gloria Carter) 04 Caught Their Eyes (feat. Tracklist: 01 Kill Jay Z 02 The Story of O.J.
“I just believe it’s one of the best songs I’ve ever written,” said Jay-Z about the forthright and mystic “4:44.” It’s a song of love and apology to his wife Beyonce, and a response to songs on her album Lemonade, where she called him out for his infidelities. Artist: Jay-Z Album: 444 Released: 2017 Style: Hip Hop Format: MP3 320Kbps Size: 105 Mb. By Shawn (Jay-Z) Carter, Ernest Dion (No ID) Wilson and Kanan Howard Keeney