Let’s be clear, I’m a Jay Z fan and have been for most of my life. And if we had to stack up everything from longevity, influence, lyrical ability, and catalog it would be hard to say that Jay Z is not the best to ever do it. Even if you’re a hater you can’t name three people that beat him out in all of these combined categories. But even a Kobe Bryant fan has to admit when his skills on the court were beginning to diminish.
The Blueprint 3 may have been the last time we saw Jay Z in strong prime like form. “Death Of Autotune” was a monster, “Empire State Of Mind” wasn’t only a smash hit Jay had some killer BARS on that joint. The Blueprint 3 also gave us “Run This Town” but in all fairness this was 2009. “Watch The Throne” was dope and that was in 2011 but to be honest we didn’t get a ton of memorable Jay Z quotables from that project although “Murder To Excellence” & “The Joy” were really dope but it could be said that little brother may have gotten him on them joints.
Here’s where the drought kind of begins. Summer of 2013 Jay Z announces he’s releasing a new album on July 4th entitled “Magna Carta Holy Grail”. Long story short the buzz was high for this album but after the release the acclaim didn’t match. On “MCHG” Jay Z clearly conformed his style throughout the project and even collaborated with Pop Star Justin Timberlake a few times. Dull collabos they were. Many Jay fans felt like Jay sounded like a fish out of water on the whole album. Hip-Hop fans aren’t a big fan of Jay Z’s art gallery talk.
From this point on it seems that we have gotten nothing but lackluster Jay Z BARS or just a hook or just him talking on a track. Who can ever forget the major pump fake on Drake’s “Pop Style”? Were those actual BARS? Was that a paid for appearance? Beyonce’s “Drunk In Love” would have been what it was with or without Jay. Jay gave us a lackluster verse on the remix of Fat Joe and Remy Ma’s smash hit “All The Way Up”. The hype surrounding that remix had New York so excited, what a let down. If we are honest with ourselves DJ Khaled’s “I Got The Keys” may have did numbers but it wasn’t well received and after the hype was gone so was the song. We’re probably not going to hear that song for years to come.
This brings us to the most recent guest feature by Jay Z. Full of hype like all the other appearances Frank Ocean announces that he had a record that features Jay Z and Tyler The Creator. Although Jay hasn’t given us much to go on lately we still have hope that we can get a great Jay Z verse from somewhere that will make us look forward to his next album. After hearing Frank Ocean’s “Biking” that features Jay Z and Frank Ocean it’s starting to make me feel that it’s time for Jay to hang it up. This verse is really bad, I don’t want to hear another Jay Z album if this is what we have to look forward to.
On the bright side from a business standpoint Jay Z is making moves that no Hip-Hop artist before him has ever made. It may be time to just sit back and focus on the Roc Nation Empire that is growing by the day. Not to mention his wife is arguably the biggest artist on the planet in the prime of her career. With all that going on there is no need to force struggle bars at this point in such an incredible career if you don’t have to. As a Jay Z fan I mean all of this with love. It may be time.
