Healing Circles : Religious Symbolism and the Cube.

Right when I motioned to close my sketch pad, though, JAY-Z shouted:

“Shawn was on that Gospel shit / I was on the total fuckin’ opposite”

Damn.

Ah, yes. I forgot.

If you’re familiar with JAY-Z, then you’re also familiar with his alter ego, HOV (yes, kind ok like HOVA or Jehovah).

With every album, HOV always makes it a point to sneak in some opinions about religion on a track or 4. Not surprising for a Sagittarian. As someone who identifies as a Christian, to me, the title also looks like a Bible verse.

I googled ‘4:44 AND Bible’ with the intent of sourcing a bunch of significant scripture. Instead, this one repeated in the results:

For Jesus himself testified, that a prophet hath no honour in his own country.

— John 4:44 KJV

I remember watching a sermon a few weeks prior on Facebook, where the Pastor monologued about alienation and displacement. (I think, in reference to this very verse.) The sermon used Jesus as the main anecdote and discussed how those closest to him — his hometown — ended up ‘missing the miracle’.

I did some more googling and found that religious historians and scholars have interpreted John 4:44 to literally mean that Jesus bypassed Nazareth on his way to Galilee. Explicating further, though, yes, this also speaks to a weird separation between Jesus of Nazareth and his hometown.

Huh.

Maybe JAY-Z’s been alienated from his home/those closest to him in someway and hasn’t had the chance to express the emotions packaged up in this album? The video footnotes for the 4:44 (the track, on Tidal) discusses this idea at length.

I thought about the cube again.

Is there some secret religious symbol hidden in the cube?

Again, I googled, and came across one of the cube’s net figures. It looks like this:

One of the Nets of a Cube. Source: Wikipedia.

A cross.

For whatever reason, the metamorphosis of the net brought another structure — a more specific cube — to mind.

Metatron’s Cube. It looks like this:

Mutation’s Cube, emphasizing the tilted cube

Metatron’s Cube forms a cube but it also forms 13 spheres. Artists, Spiritualists, and Healers often reference this shape when discussing things like Creationism, the Chromatic Scale in music, chakras, healing energy through the galactic center, and all sorts of stuff that I won’t go into here (for the sake of brevity).

Interesting, though.

If HOV really is referencing Metatron’s cube, he wouldn’t be the first famous artist to do so. Leonardo da Vinci, the great grand-daddy of Cubism, also took a great interest in this shape, but in a different form, called the stellated octahedron.

“Stellated Octahedron” from “De Divina Proportione”. 1509. Leonardo da Vinci. Illustration.

I squinted at the illustration.

Huh.

The color scheme even looks sort of similar to 4:44’s album cover/color scheme. Elevatas (at the top of da Vinci’s drawing) — a latin conjugation for the verb ēlevō, meaning to raise/elevate but also to alleviate or lessen —would encompass everything from the Standard elevator fight to the lonely nights in Rome, tellin’ Bey to phone home, to the Roc.

So maybe, in the same way Magna Carta, Holy Grails’ album artwork derived from Italian sculptor Battista di Domenico Lorenzi’s “Alpheus and Arethusa”:

The Met promoting ‘Magna Carta, Holy Grail’ in 2013

4:44's album artwork…

4:44 Album Artwork

…might also derive from famous art, in this case — da Vinci’s “Stellated Octahedron” illustration. Taking one more look, the stellated octahedron also resembles a compass rose:

Source: Pintrest.

…or, better, the Vitruvian Man, where da Vinci basically forms a compass rose with his body:

Vitruvian Man. Leonardo da Vinci. appx. 1940. Drawing.

That’s when a real hypothesis started to form. Inconspicuous Branding… Tom Ford...(never mind.)

What if the 4:44 symbolizes not only the compass rose but just a straight up compass (for drawing and squaring a circle)?

That would make sense — JAY-Z talking about/to his inner circle, his family, his fanbase; teaching listeners, (black) men in particular, how to navigate the apology (or maybe the Greek apologia) to compliment the sentiments of Lemonade but in a polar opposite way.

That’s what I’m going with.

More so, what if the sequence has to do with art history — a sequence of movements or events, denoted by periods in time?

The Hidden Artwork in 4:44 — Romanticism to Post-modernism

Separation. Edvard Munch. 1896. Oil and Canvas (Public Domain)

In the days that followed, I listened to the album over and over again in the background of my daily routine until the scores, the shapes, the numbers, the ratios the drama, the verses began to blur.

I started to see things and hear things in the music: classic fine art from different movements, Shakespearean plays, and it occurred to me — this album is literally a work of art.

What does 4:44 mean?

Displacement (if I had to give my best guess). I could be entirely incorrect on that, though.

What’s more important: the journey. The title pushed me to think. In the process of curating the art references for more writing, I started to wonder — given the low Millennial turnout to Museums these days — just how many of JAY-Z’s fans actually catch on to these references and allusions.

What happens when the artist evolves before the audience?

I’m hoping to make connections (for those of you that have an interest in this sort of thing) through conversation about fine art, the philosophies behind artwork, and the album in a forthcoming project.