Jay-Z really meant it when he said he was a “business, man,” huh? After releasing nine albums in the aughts, he put out only four in the 2010s, and none so far this decade. That makes every new song feel like an event, with Jay leaving knotty phrases for diehards to unpack across the ensuing months of talent management, Netflix projects, and a gig executive producing the Super Bowl halftime show. In his last musical outing, DJ Khaled’s 2022 posse cut “God Did,” Jay dazzled with a double serving of hagiographic heft: “These ain’t songs, these is hymns ’cause I’m him / It’s the Psalm 151, this New Testament / The Book of Hov / Jesus turned water to wine, for Hov, it just took a stove.” In hindsight, that bit looks like a pitch deck for “The Book of Hov,” the immersive exhibit at the Brooklyn Public Library that gave fans a chance to visit memorabilia from key points in his career, and The Book of Clarence, Jeymes Samuel’s Black Jesus dramedy that hit Stateside last week alongside a soundtrack featuring “I Want You Forever,” a collaboration with Jay-Z and D’Angelo.
Like Marvel Studios, Jay is always using something you like to try to sell you on something else. Seizing the reins of the musical direction for the NFL’s biggest night softens the league’s image one star-studded spectacle at a time, and dropping gems that can only be found on soundtracks looks to restore the feeling of being lured into ’90s event films by classic loosies from Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, and DMX. This is old news to the star of 1998’s Streets Is Watching and the executive producer of 2013’s The Great Gatsby. He understands a multimedia push. What’s new is that Jay-Z’s musical output is somewhat confined to these promotional outings, and he has gotten lost in the shuffle.
“I Want You Forever” returns to the marriage of exposition and introspection driving 4:44, as Jay waxes poetic about a moment where relationship woes made desire hurt, and the gift of connection is displaced by the curse of regret. He sends a belated shot at Goodie Mob’s Big Gipp for saying Bey would’ve been with 2Pac if he lived — “Got these niggas next level hatin’, matchmakin’ from the grave / Are y’all okay?” — and admits he slept on the couch during a spat because “The bed’s not a bed without you.” It’s a headline-grabbing admission coming from one half of a billionaire power couple, but as love songs go, that part’s been done. “Grown man rap” does not need to lean into the lyrical conventions of ’80s AOR to crack the cast-iron roughness of masculinity in hip-hop. Jay lands on a smarter approach at the end of the verse as he compares his faults to his father’s shortcomings. The analogies couching the thought — “Damn, girl, you a wave,” “Baby girl, you fire” — feel rote but it’s notable to hear a man who to used to let his songs cry in his place cop to thug tears in private.
Ultimately, “I Want You Forever” amounts to a ten-minute sound bath, a funk refrain growing more enticingly psychedelic with each repetition, simmering to and through Jay’s anticlimax. D’Angelo’s vocal harmonies never overstate themselves in the big-band attack. But a lesser vocalist couldn’t get away with stretching one phrase — “All I wanna say is that I love you so much / I don’t wanna be without you / I want you forever” — over several minutes. He sang the shit out that shit. (His vampiness takes some heat off the fact that we’ve been waiting for a new album from him for a few years now too.) Jay’s muted, conversational performance bucks the trend set by feisty guest verses elsewhere on The Book of Clarence’s soundtrack. Jeymes Samuel’s international, intergenerational tastes jump out in these moments. Folding soul, reggae, and Miami rap into funk jams suits the wheelhouse of a songwriter and producer who thinks to put Lucy Liu and Jay Electronica on the same song.
But “I Want You Forever” is an oddity in Samuel and Jay’s expanding catalogue of film tie-in tracks (see: Judas and the Black Messiah’s “What It Feels Like” with Nipsey Hussle; The Harder They Fall’s “King Kong Riddim” and “Guns Go Bang”; and Gatsby’s “100$ Bill”) in that the elusive rap mogul’s bars feel more like a nice Worcestershire sauce for a great steak than the audacious return of a rapper whose fans waited a year for a scripture. While his entrepreneurial and interdisciplinary media skills are celebrated, and New York City Council is floating legislation to declare his birthday a national holiday, it’s hard not to wish Jay-Z cared a little more about the original gig.
