It is right here where you miss full-blown Hova more than ever - especially Jay’s whispered parts, where he draws the listener close - so much that you’ll promise to buy a Tiffany’s bracelet if only he’d make an entire album of raps just like this. Less reggae-riffic, but twice as scene-setting, is the expansively orchestrated “Guns Go Bang.” While Kid Cudi’s handsome AutoTune is gently caressed by the song’s ascending French horns, the Ennio Morricone-like swelling strings and open, atmospheric chords of “Guns Go Bang” offers Jay-Z space for his crispest, frankest and most emotional rap since “4:44.” Rather than come across like a cultural appropriator, Jay-Z the writer sounds right at home with roaming Jamaican musicology. Jay-Z’s co-write on the film’s title track, with an effortlessly cool Koffee, is an FX-squiggly brand of hypnotic lovers’ rock with quiet background-vocal “whoa-ohs” and puncturing rat-tat-tat rhythms. On a cut so very Eric B & Rakim-meets-Augustus Pablo, Jay-Z goes on about “speaking patois” and “Jamaican connections” with Kingston funk and fluency. and the Chicago Bulls, then,” before riffing about Tiger Woods and being paid in full, all to the repetitive click of a single guitar string. Going back-in-the-day on his rhyme, Hova raps about being “raised by wolves and the crack…. Rough, clacketing reggae suits Jay’s voice to a ‘Z’ on the chest-thumping “King Kong Riddim,” with Jadakiss, Conway the Machine and BackRoad Gee. If Jay’s not hitting the links on the hauntingly cinematic “Guns Go Bang” - a Kid Cudi collaboration - with a clear, cutting rap, he’s lending his talents to Jamaican vocalist Koffee as her soundtrack’s song’s co-writer, showing off his recently discovered taste for various tones of the reggae rainbow. With him in the saddle as the accompanying album’s curator and co-executive producer - along with Samuel, who not only produced and played guitar but co-wrote all the tracks - the various-artists-driven “The Harder They Fall” soundtrack makes up for all the Jay-Z we’ve been missing by allowing his voice, literally and figuratively, to flow freely across the expanse of its 15 tracks.Īs curator and artist, Jay-Z makes a killing on “The Harder They Fall.” In a season where Shawn Carter has operated more as a businessman (the Monogram cannabis line), pitchman (for Tiffany’s with Beyoncé) and activist (for prison reform and racial justice issues), “The Harder They Fall” could seem like just one more in a line of worthy distractions and noble causes.īut “The Harder They Fall” feels like the album fans have been waiting for since 2017’s “4:44,” whether he’s always visible in the driver’s seat or not. For all of those mentions, though, we’d only gotten about 15 minutes of Hova rap and rhyme time in three years.įor the soundtrack to first-time director Jeymes Samuel’s bloody Spaghetti Western update, “ The Harder They Fall,” Jay-Z helped turn the revenge-driven horse opera into something pulp fiction-y. Sure, he was featured on Pharrell and Jay Electronica tracks in 2020 and popped up on Kanye West, Nipsey Hussle and Jay Electronica records this year, on the way to this weekend’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction. Though he hasn’t been completely out of the public eye, or ear, there hasn’t been much Jay-Z to go around lately.
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