Once upon a time they were inseparable, but then Jay-Z did an awful thing and Ed Whatley knew it was the end for them.

All of us have had that moment in a relationship. You’ve loved each other for a long time, gone through good and bad, had some great times on cold nights in or hot summer holidays. Helped each other through the shaky times, sticking together even when you’ve had fallings out, let all those bad habits go and still loved the make-up sex. But there’s that one moment, when you know, you just know – it’s over. The person you loved has gone.

This year Jay-Z released a single, Young Forever. Oh God. Like a tearful girlfriend confessing she’s been cheating after a day you’d set aside to just, you know, hang out, like we used to, this song sat at the end of Blueprint 3, Jay’s most recent album. Blueprint 3 isn’t bad, but it does have the whiff of someone trying to make stadium hip hop. Of trying to get into Bono World. Coldplay World. The world where Eno produces your album in between grotesque charity events sponsored by Apple and attended by Naomi Campbell. See, Kanye West and Jay worked out a couple of albums ago that if they were going to fulfil their multi-million dollar live contracts they needed to start rapping slower. Because in the same way that Led Zeppelin clocked in the 70s that you needed to be loud as hell, and U2 realised in the 80s that you needed space between the sounds, and Coldplay realised in the Noughties that you needed simple melodies to get across to 100,000 people a night, you can’t rap quick and complex in an icy barn to people who haven’t been listening properly. It. Has. To. Be. Slow. And it can’t be too specific. And it can’t upset your sponsors. OK, all records are made within parameters, that’s the nature of creation. But those are some chokers.

So OK, she’s been hanging out with some new people. So OK, her career’s more important than you; fair enough, you don’t own her. And look, you’ve had so many great times together, like all those parties you went to (Give It 2 Me), like all those good times in the sack (Big Pimpin’), like the time she kept your head up when you were all broke down (Blueprint). But this song, this Young Forever, she’s in flagrante dressed as a nun with his sexual effluent all over her face. And the pictures are all over the internet. There’s no going back.

This song, this bloody song. A cover – not a sample, not an interpolation, a frigging cover. A cover of an extraordinarily awful 80s pop turd bemoaning impending nuclear doom, a doom that could be no worse than this glum and keening gauche-fest. Played on awful portentous synths with a totally perfunctory "beat", the hook is sung by Brit cipher Mr Hudson, sounding like an autotuned duck with no sense of irony. And Jay? The greatest lyricist of his generation?

"Fear not when, fear not why,
Fear not much while we’re alive,
Life is for living not living up tight,
See ya somewhere up in the sky"

Below piss poor. A nod to drug-dealing later in the song. Wow. As bland, anodyne and pointless as the worst Snow Patrol atrocity. It’s over. I’m sorry. I loved you. It’s over.

And who can I start seeing now? Drake? Drake? All she talks about is house prices. Lil Wayne’s druggy stream of consciousness blither? I might as well shack up with Crazy Katy in the squat. Eminem? She just isn’t... she used to be pretty. I think I’m just going to have to stay in rap celibacy for a bit. Let the wounds heal.