Here is the hero heading toward twilight, or perhaps reframing what it means to be a public hero at all. “That’s my superpower!” Mr. West barks at the end of “Yikes,” speaking about his bipolar disorder diagnosis. “Ain’t no disability!”

For Jay-Z, the acceptance of his recession from his peak began with last year’s “4:44,” a moody, raw album from an artist who’d long been self-examining, but rarely made it central to his public persona. But marital strife has a way of undoing hubris, and Jay-Z’s public arc has lately been defined by a kind of deflation. When he’s performed alongside his wife, as during her acclaimed Coachella set, he’s seemed small. He’s been the subject of several needling memes, the internet’s tool of casual disrespect, making him an avatar of befuddlement or physical awkwardness. He knows what the kids are saying about him: “Online they call me ‘dad’ kiddingly,” he raps on “Heard About Us.”

Throughout “Everything Is Love,” he is the less present force — the less present rapper, even. It is charming, as ever, to hear him rap about being in awe of his wife, especially when addressing his own shortcomings: “My first time in the ocean went exactly as you’d expect/Meanwhile you going hard, jumping off the top deck/A leap of faith, I knew I was up next.”

A decade ago, a rap superstar would have been unlikely to rap about perceived weaknesses of any kind, certainly of the sort that come with age. (Eminem is, in this way, an outlier, much as he is in a outlier in many others; weakness has been his gasoline since the beginning of his career.) But as life has thrust him away from rap’s center, Jay-Z is provocatively reimagining the genre’s boundaries and expiration date.

Learning that your emperor has no clothes is an emotionally taxing experience, so it’s unsurprising that Drake has delved into that territory so effectively. On “Emotionless,” he raps, “Meeting all my heroes like seeing how magic works/The people I looked up to are going from bad to worse/Their actions out of character even when they rehearse.”