But it’s better than good: a gorgeously produced stab at self-examination (it runs less than the length of a standard therapy session) that suggests a new direction for rap’s elder statesmen. It also demonstrates a way that certain black artists can reckon with middle age — by accepting the emotionalism, humor and self-criticism that come naturally to a current generation of younger rappers.

Anybody irritated by the posturing of Jay-Z’s previous album, “Magna Carta: Holy Grail” (2013), was likely put off by the prospect of more. If a major rapper arrives at his mid-40s and wants to give us a song that mentions fine wines and a serial-killer drug dealer, then drops the name of a fashion-designer-movie-director more than a dozen times (“Tom Ford”), maybe he should be hosting the Grammys, too.

It’s entirely possible that Jay-Z arrived to record “Magna Carta” aware that there’s not much of a road map for a rapper in his 40s, especially one whose body of work and reputation are great enough to haunt him. His clever, brash, kaleidoscopically grim 1996 debut, “Reasonable Doubt,” is as much a work of memoir of life in the street-level drug trade as it is an album.

On it, he raps with the impunity of a mafia don. It’s a distinction that’s always kept him seeming a little older than everybody else, while, eventually, holding his competitors’ youth against them. On songs like “Change Clothes,” with Pharrell, from 2003, and “Off That,” with a young-and-hungry Drake, from 2009, he was all too happy to display a cranky old-soul impatience, arguing that because he thinks he is grown up, his peers should, too.

“Y’all [epithet] acting way too tough/Throw on a suit, and get it tapered up,” he implored on “Change Clothes.”