Jay Z releases song about police brutality

About a year ago, Jay Z started working on a song about police brutality but never finished it.

In the week of recent events, he decided to release it.

The track is available on Tidal to subscribers and non-subscribers.

"[My colleague] told me I should drop it when Mike Brown died, sadly I told him, 'This issue will always be relevant.' I'm hurt that I knew his death wouldn't be the last," he wrote in a statement accompanying the song, as seen on Billboard's website. "I'm saddened and disappointed in THIS America. We should be further along. WE ARE NOT. I trust God and know everything that happens is for our greatest good, but man ... it's tough right now."

The song, called "Spiritual," features a sound collage of snippets of different voices, some electronically altered, and Jay Z rapping, "No, I'm not poison/No I'm not poison/Just a boy from the hood that/Got my hands in the air in despair/Don't shoot, I just wanna do good."

In another verse, the rapper makes reference to Blue Ivy, his daughter with wife Beyoncé, rapping, "I'm smack dab in a hurricane of emotions/Can't even raise my little daughter/My little Carter/We call her blue 'cause it's sad that/How can I be a dad that/I never had that/Shattered in a million pieces/Where the glass at?/I need a drink or something/I need an angelic voice to sing somethin'."

The rapper also sent "blessings to all the families that have lost loved ones to police brutality," and concluded his statement with a quote from 19th century writer and activist Frederick Douglass: "Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe. "

Billboard reported that this is Jay Z's first new material as a lead artist on a song since 2013's "Magna Carta...Holy Grail."

Cox Media Group