Magna Carta Holy Grail Review

The rollout was the headline, and it has shaped the album's reputation ever since. Samsung bought a million copies and gave them away through an app to owners of its Galaxy phones on July 4, 2013, days before the record reached shops. None of those million counted toward the chart, and it debuted at number one anyway, with 528,000 sold in its first week. The reviews were mixed, averaging 60 on Metacritic, and it has been easy to treat it as a product launch with songs attached. Heard now, it is better than that.

It is the most lavish-sounding solo record he made. Timbaland produced most of it with J-Roc, and it is some of the best work of his later career: Tom Ford is a club record with a piece of M.I.A.'s Bad Girls inside it, and Adrian Younge samples give Picasso Baby and Heaven their weight. Around him, Pharrell makes Oceans, Hit-Boy makes Somewhereinamerica, and WondaGurl and Travis Scott make Crown, the darkest beat here. The gloss that sounded cold in 2013 is a mood, cool, expensive and nocturnal, and it holds across the hour.

The subject is what all that money is for, and it is more serious than the rollout suggested. Holy Grail, with Justin Timberlake on the hook and a line borrowed from Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit, is about a love and hate relationship with fame; it reached number four and won a Grammy. Oceans, recorded with Frank Ocean during the Watch the Throne sessions, sounds like a party on a yacht, and Jay-Z has said its undertow is that this is the same water that brought his ancestors over as slaves.

Jay-Z Blue, which samples Biggie's My Downfall and Faye Dunaway's monologue from Mommie Dearest, is a real anxiety about becoming his own absent father. Heaven quotes R.E.M.'s Losing My Religion, and Picasso Baby became a performance at the Pace Gallery in New York, filmed by Mark Romanek after Marina Abramović's The Artist Is Present.

The writing is where it falls short of his best. Picasso Baby's verse is essentially a list of artists he can afford, and too many songs are complaints about being underestimated from one of the two richest men in rap, so the lyrics sit a tier under the rest. But the questions are the right ones, what fame costs, what art and ownership mean to him, what kind of father he will be, and the sound around them is lavish. It was his last solo album for four years, until 4:44 answered those questions in plain speech. This is the record that asked them.