Jay Z has always been the most grown up of rap stars but on this he reaches new heights. Frank Ocean, Gloria Carter, Damian Marley, The-Dream and Kim Burrell provide chorus vocals but there are no guest rappers, Jay Z is on his own here, baring his soul. His assiduous mix of soul samples, live musicianship and digital sprinkles lends the album a strong sonic flavour, with a sweet reggae tinge coming through in places. Most pop albums these days use multiple producers but Jay Z has worked with just one, Ernest Wilson AKA No ID, a veteran Chicago beat maker who acted as a mentor to Kanye West. None of this would matter if the album itself wasn’t great. He raises the tone elsewhere quoting from Shakespeare (“better yet here’s a verse from Hamlet”) and Lewis Carroll (“the Red Queen’s Race/ You run this hard just to stay in place”). Jay Z disses Kanye (confirming that the former collaborators are at odds), celebrates his mother’s late life lesbianism, apologises to Solange and affirms an extra marital ménage-a-trois involving a woman named Becky previously mentioned in Beyonce’s hit Sorry. There’s plenty of juicy titbits for the gossip columns. It’s an approach sure to limit its legal dissemination, especially given that Tidal only has a comparatively tiny share of the streaming market, and most fans are already paying to use other services. Jay Z’s justification on the upbeat Family Feud is that black Americans should support black owned business and “we merrily eatin’ off these streams”. It is only being made available via his own streaming service, Tidal (and its partner Sprint), for which you have to subscribe for $9.99 a month. The release of 4:44 is proving controversial. “I’m trying to give you a million dollars’ worth of game for $9.99,” Jay Z impatiently declares at one point. This is an album of such potency and power it might be a game changer – if its intended audience actually get to hear it.

“You wanna know what's more important than throwing away money at a strip club? Credit/ You ever wonder why Jewish people own all the property in America? This how they did it/ Financial freedom my only hope/ F- living rich and dying broke,” he raps on The Story of OJ, a mighty polemic about modern black identity.

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