JAY-Z's Borrowed Time

Commentary on JAY-Z's "4:44" (released in 2017 on the album of the same name) has been preoccupied with numerology: the apparent significance of the number four for unlocking the song's purported autobiographical secrets. In this article, I read "4:44" rather differently and in terms of hip-hop's consummate aesthetic practices of borrowing and intertextuality. As I explain, "4:44" shares some broad features with the famous "silent piece" 4'33" (1952) by the American composer John Cage. While Cage's 4'33" lasts for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, JAY-Z's song "4:44" lasts for four minutes and forty-four seconds; in each case, hazy notions of "musical time" compete with a dispassionate "clock time" duration, which each musical work proclaims in its title. Taking cues from current debates on temporality in black and queer studies, this article offers a speculative reading of JAY-Z's "4:44" as both referencing and forgetting Cage's famous duration of "four thirty-three." I analyze JAY-Z's "4:44" as a means to ask how hip-hop's unremitting intertextuality might challenge or unmake a linear temporal logic of source to citation, of authentic origins to new horizons. First, I suggest how "4:44" illuminates a history of black experimental music that the canonization of Cage's output both depends on and occludes. Next, I argue that "4:44" remains calibrated to an "extreme present" that acts as a subtle bulwark against the past, including a history that canonizes Cage. By way of conclusion, I indicate how further discussion of hip-hop's temporalities—its uses of time—might help renew attention to its sonic and visual apprehension of the present.