Tattoo You ends with the last capital-G great Stones song, “Waiting on a Friend,” where Jagger memorably sings that “making love and breaking hearts, it is a game for youth.” The tension in “Waiting on a Friend” is that Jagger acknowledges the limits of his dick-swinging persona, particularly for a man his age, while making no attempt to back away from it.3 It’s the point where Jagger as a recognizable flesh-and-blood person in Rolling Stones songs ends, and Jagger as a profitable persona permanently assumes control. Jay-Z’s “Waiting on a Friend” moment4 comes during the Beyoncé duet “Part II (On the Run),” where he raps “she fell in love with the bad guy, bad guy / what you doing with them rap guys, them rap guys / they ain’t see potential in me girl, but you see it.” Jay makes it clear on MCHG that he’s not a bad guy — unless you’re overly sensitive about an art collector allowing his infant daughter to touch his Basquiat collection, as Jay does in “Picasso Baby” — though he’s not above playing the role for old times’ sake. (Like on “La Familia,” which promises to go Liam Neeson on anyone who might want to kidnap Beyoncé, in case that’s something anyone is considering.)
“The album is about, like, this duality of how do you navigate through this whole thing, through success, through failures, through all this and remain yourself,” Jay says to a barefoot Rick Rubin in the first MCHG commercial. His solution to this quandary of spiritual geopositioning is putting as much distance as possible between the real Jay-Z and what he’s propagating, and what he’s propagating and his audience. This distance isn’t bad, necessarily — it’s just that, like any amusement ride, MCHG only seems empty and banal when examined up close.
Questlove rightly called Watch the Throne “the definitive black stadium album”; Magna Carta … Holy Grail is less definitive, but it’s equally suited for the cavernous spaces where Jay-Z now lives and works. The focal point of MCHG‘s weirdly sentimental ad campaign has been the album’s personal and political content, as in the commercials spotlighting “Oceans,” in which Jay contrasts yachts with slave ships, and “Jay-Z Blue,” in which he reappropriates Faye Dunaway’s chewiest sound bites from the 1981 camp classic Mommie Dearest for an ode about fatherly devotion.5 Fans of MCHG will likely point to these tracks as signs of Jay-Z’s “growth,” but I suspect most listeners are already skipping over them to get to the more superficial and enjoyable bangers: the fashion-obsessed “Tom Ford,” the skronking (and unmistakably “Thrift Shop”–esque) “Somewhereinamerica,” and the Latin-tinged “BBC.” MCHG, at its best, plays it broad for the cheap seats — the solid and occasionally spectacular production (much of it courtesy of Timbaland with able assistance from Pharrell Williams, Swizz Beatz, The-Dream, and “Niggas in Paris” co-producer Hit-Boy) takes precedence over Jay-Z’s solid and occasionally better-than-solid lyrics on the “deep” and “thoughtful” slower cuts.