When you heard the song “Heaven,” what was the first thing you thought of?
The Ambassador: I watched the antagonism toward Jay-Z for some time now and I didn’t read into it, but I’ve listened to several interviews, listened to certain things that he’s said and I almost envision ‘Heaven’ being the overflow of a heart.
For so long, I’ve listened to conspiracy theories that made Jay-Z out to be more than what I believe he is, a bona fide sinner who has absolutely no religious affection whatsoever. Jay-Z is basically a really adamant secularist.
He’s been swatting at this gnat for a long time—dismissing the Illuminati, dismissing all of this stuff, almost like he’s finding it rather funny that the only reason why people are saying that stuff is because they’re looking at his success and have to ascribe it to something. They’ve got to villainize what really is just generic sin with a lot of
money backing it—unique, extraordinary talent and a lot of skillful moves that gave it legs.
In “No Church in the Wild,” he said, “Lies on the lips of a priest, Thanksgiving disguised as a feast.” He’s talking about that there are priests who are lying, just like there were those who took America by force, but they were Christians who, again, shared Thanksgiving with the very people that they ended up slaughtering. They learned how to do certain things from them and then took their land in the name of this organized religion from Jay’s standpoint.
He’s saying, “I don’t have any respect for any of that. I’m basically just a secularist. They may label me a heretic, but that’s just what I am. I’m the heretic who’s out here vacationing in Marrakesh. I’m that dude losing my religion. You’re out there shaking in the floors of the church. I’m out here shaking to the music of my wife. That’s me losing my religion.”
I think that Jay espouses the view that there is a god up there, but he’s so undefined that he has not revealed himself, he is not necessarily a he (a person), God is an idea and God is so definition-less that everyone’s take on it is just as valid as anybody else’s take on it. In other words, he doesn’t mind god coming up, but he doesn’t like any organized religion’s God.
When I heard ‘Heaven,’ I thought it was consistent with a guy who basically says that nobody is right to exercise authority on the subject of God; nobody is able to tell people what definitely is, and make other people conform to it. So when I heard it, I said, “Yep! Here’s Jay’s philosophy: God is no more than the best thing you could imagine, the best situation that you could imagine and the entity that people look at as the highest thing up there is not somebody that you are accountable to.”
They say only God can judge us, but they never anticipate that they are going to stand before a judge. He says that in the last line, “Only God could judge us, mother—.”
