Time and space are woven together into a fabric, which in turn is deeply dimpled by the great mass of the Earth. This creates something called a space-time vortex around Earth that, in artists' depictions, looks like an awesome pasta bowl. According to this theory, shortcuts through the spacetime vortex, called wormholes, are topographical links between the folds of this fabric. These links are traversable, meaning that we can travel from one point in spacetime to the next. Time travel, bitches!

Now, granted the manifold truth of the above, whither Jay? I'm not saying he's a time-travelling hydra, exactly, but it's complicated. Right off the top of "Blue Magic" is Jay just under-articulating the "T" fof "Great Hova"? Or is it that, ever so briefly, Hov' is playfully resigned to his status as the elder statesman of hip hop, a druidic wormhole-hopping warlock known as "Gray Hova"? We need clues; we have no choice but to parse this shit.

It's late 2007. Jay-Z, post-retirement, post-return, views a movie opening in 2007 about an early 1970s drug kingpin Frank Lucas that brings him back to that time, but also back to his time on the streets, and his days as a young rapper. Returning to the present inspired, Jay records an album that he claims is, I'm quoting from a radio interview, "more in line with Reasonable Doubt and Blueprint... and Black Album as well... well, and Volume 1." 1999, 2001, 2003, 1997. Jay claims that he is always moving forward, always adding layers, but that the movie's story and style allowed him to move backward ("This '87 state of mind that I'm in / I'm my prime"). The album also supposedly has internal time, with three arcs constituting a beginning, middle, and an end. Jay claims he set out to make a movie, and is looking for directors to visually score this already narrative album. An album about a movie made into another movie. Oh! And rumour has it that "Blue Magic" was recorded for 2006's Kingdom Come, which explains why the connections with the movie are only tacked on (title and outro audio snippet) and why it uncannily reminds us of a record that came out seven days after Jay's last.

Yes, Pharrell's track sounds like an outtake from Hell Hath No Fury (2006). And coincidentally, Jay is spitting a hushed, cold rap about crack. Not about heroin or how great he is -- okay, it's always about how great he is -- but for the first time we're hearing the nitty gritty details. Cooking, packing. It's Jay aping contemporary crack rap, and is that really a trip backward? And then there's the cadence. It's as much Malice as it is Rakim, who's name-dropped in the second verse.

Jay recently recorded a track called "Dead Presidents 3." Is Jay's age (37) coupled with the industry's lust for youth collapsing his mind, and with it timespace? Is being ridiculously on top while constantly reminded that his best days are behind him making Mana flow out Jay's eyeholes? We're all basically desperate for a god's return-to-form, and Hov' s trying so hard he's approaching the event horizon.

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