When rapper self-mythologizing was in its infancy, Jay-Z was its most faithful student. He absorbed the art of the boast, and built on that to create one of pop’s most fascinating characters: the street-corner hustler turned multimillionaire, slick and unbothered. Complex emotions often formed the foundation of his tales of ascendancy, but his greatest talent was making his path seem smooth and inevitable. No matter how high the stakes, he remained cold as ice.

When you are on top, or racing there, this is an unimpeachable approach. But when you’ve been reigning for a while, it can come to seem despotic, ungenerous, false. When your equally famous wife lays waste to that manicured image with an album full of personal, musical and political fire, continuing with the old way of doing things is not an option. Evolve or disappear. Find new life or accept death.

As an elder statesman — recently the first rapper to be enshrined in the Songwriters Hall of Fame — Jay-Z would have been forgiven for tapping out and letting silence be a kind of victory. Only extreme emotional-spiritual catharsis or extreme stripped-down intimacy would make for a worthwhile comeback.

Image The cover of “4:44,” the new album by Jay-Z.

On the confidently vulnerable “4:44,” his 13th studio album and first in four years, he has chosen both. Viewed from different angles, “4:44” (Roc Nation) is a long-simmering, eyes-downcast confession; a relaxing of muscles that have been tense for decades; the return of a rule-rewriting mastermind as a moralist and occasional scold; a marketing ploy intended to bolster two second-tier businesses, the streaming service Tidal and the phone company Sprint. (For now, at least, you need one or both to listen to the album, without seeking out a bootleg.)