‘Kill Jay Z’? The king is back, but different

Forget about the old Jay Z, breathing easy, getting dirt off his shoulder, no hyphen before Z, no cap-sized letters, spelled like every other name.

The $610m rapper is releasing 4:44 this Friday, and has shared a teaser clip titled “Kill Jay Z” – an allusion to his recent name change.

The clip shows a young black man running in slow motion, police sirens in the background.

He is also wearing a shirt which reads “Stay Black”. He is running for his life.

JAY-Z wants to reinvent himself and, by reinstating the hyphen, he also wants to take a step back and remind everyone where he is coming from.

This will be the rapper’s first album in four years, his fifth since his 2003 supposed retirement, and fans are as excited as suspicious, unsure of what they are getting.

And there is a good reason for it, since his last album, 2013’s Magna Carta…Holy Grail was received with mixed reviews.

It was not the Jay Z critics were expecting. Too many collaborations, Timbalands and Timberlakes, not enough “street”, too much privilege and financial success, too many jokes and name swaps and mediocre lyrics.

And now he is father to newborn twins, the most successful rapper in the world, the first to make it to the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame.

He chose Father’s Day to announce the album’s first trailer.

The track is called Adnis, the name of his dead father – Adnis Reeves – with whom he had a complicated relationship growing up.

The two mended their Wilsonian fences a few years ago, and the 47-year-old rapper appears to be reaching a stage in his life where his music is looking inward.

To reflect the present, JAY-Z has to look back to the past.

At 13, the then named Shawn Carter was selling drugs in the streets of Brooklyn. His father had just left him and his mother.

“Anger. At the whole situation,” Jay told Oprah Winfrey.

“Because when you’re growing up, your dad is your superhero. Once you’ve let yourself fall that in love with someone, once you put him on such a high pedestal and he lets you down, you never want to experience that pain again.”

Then he changed his name, found hip hop and years later founded Tidal, the first artist-owned streaming service in the world.

Now he is changing his name again, reinventing himself and showing a more intimate stage of his life.

4:44, the album’s title, is as reflective of this as his teaser videos, with both JAY and his wife Beyonce being born at the fourth day of their month, and having married on 4 April.

Father, daughters, husband and wife. JAY-Z is a different man now, and we cannot wait to meet him. – news.sky.com