Retirement sounds like the perfect life; bumming around all day watching Countdown and occasionally wetting yourself. Wait, that's not retirement – that's what our life's like now. Jay-Z, on the other hand, hates retirement.
Remember Jay-Z's last album, The Black Album? Of course you do, it only came out about quarter of an hour ago. Anyway, all through The Black Album, Jay-Z kept yakking on about how it was going to be his last album, and how he was going to retire from rapping to let young pups like Kevin Federline take over. And now, in probably the least surprising news you'll ever read, Jay-Z has ended his retirement and will be releasing a new album Kingdom Come in the autumn. And Chris Martin is on it. Chris Martin from Coldplay. What are the chances that we can convince Jay-Z that retirement is actually pretty cool?
For all his relentless boasting and swagger, we never really got the impression that retirement was going to be Jay-Z's thing. Sure, he did spend every single track on The Black Album telling us a million times that he really was retiring forever, honest, but after a few weeks of knocking about at home sucking on Murray Mints with Beyonce getting under his feet, Jay-Z was never going to stay retired long. And that explains Kingdom Come, the forthcoming Jay-Z album. Jay-Z told Entertainment Weekly:
"It was the worst retirement, maybe, in history… I believed it, yeah. I believed it for two years… Something, when you love it, is always tugging at you and itching at you, and I was putting it off and putting it off. I started fumbling around to see if it felt good."
Of course, Jay-Z's retirement wasn't all home-baking and volunteering down the Cancer Research shop – while he wasn't making music, Jay-Z became the CEO of Def Jam records, made a documentary about dirty water and ended his long-running feud with Nas, meaning there's one less person in the world that Jay-Z needs to call a big arsehole every few minutes. Oh, and Jay-Z also did his best to guest rap on every single piece of music on the planet, including Deja Vu by Beyonce, the theme-tune to The Antiques Roadshow and the man dressed as the Pope playing a Bontempi keyboard who hangs around Canterbury sometimes. But now Jay-Z can put all that behind him, as his retirement is ending with the autumn's release of new album Kingdom Come.
Kingdom Come is apparently more like The Black Album than The Blueprint, and has joined forces with Dr Dre, Kanye West, Timbaland and, um Chris Martin from Coldplay. This one's going to take some explaining, Jay-Z:
"We met a charity dinner and just kept in touch. He sent me these beautiful chords for this song called Beach Chair. I had Dre put some drums on it. It's really, really incredible."
Perhaps it's a song about having a mental wife who hates Britain, names her children after Biblical figures and gets her houses ghostbusted before she moves in, who knows? Either way, Jay-Z must be hoping that Kingdom Come is a hit, otherwise he'll be back collecting shopping trolleys for the £1 deposit before he knows it.
Read more:
Jay-Z Officially Unretires – E! Online
[story by Stuart Heritage]