Kanye and Jay-Z Unleash 'H.A.M.' on Facebook

Click to listen to Kanye West and Jay-Z's "H.A.M."

"H.A.M.," the first single from Kanye West and Jay-Z's forthcoming team-up album Watch the Throne, debuted just after midnight last night on a dedicated Facebook page.

Photos: Kanye West's Career Highs — and Lows

The track, a sinister electro banger with an intense operatic coda, has yet to debut in online music shops such as iTunes and Amazon. But by 9 a.m. EST it had already been played over 43,000 times and was making the rounds as a leaked mp3 — despite only being available as a stream on Facebook.

Photos: Jay-Z and Eminem Launch Home & Home Tour in Detroit

Though West recently announced that Watch the Throne would be released this week, it now looks more likely that the full album will come out sometime in March.

Watch the Throne [Facebook]

• 
  MUSIC Exclusive Live Chat With Linkin Park and Incubus
• 
  MOVIES & TV Peter Travers: 'The Avengers' Has it All
• 
  POLITICS Matt Taibbi: Jon Corzine Is the Original Zimmerman
• 
  VIDEOS Exclusive Premiere: Tenacious D's 'Tinnitus'

Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

More Song Stories entries »

Twitter