Jay-Z has addressed his feud with protégé Kanye West.
On the track “What’s Free” off Meek Mill’s album Championships that dropped Friday, his first since being released from prison on what many feel were trumped-up charges, Hov spits a few lines aimed directly at the (former?) die-hard Trump supporter West:
“No red hat, don’t Michael and Prince me and Ye / They separate you when you got Michael and Prince’s DNA / I ain’t one of these house n*ggas you bought / My house like a resort, my house bigger than yours / My spo—c’mon, man—my route better of course…”
ADVERTISEMENT
The feud between Jay and Ye actually predates the latter’s MAGA hat-wearing phase, and may have started in 2014 when music’s first couple sat out West’s lavish Italy nuptials to reality superstar/entrepreneur Kim Kardashian. What followed was a war of words, mostly by West, including a series of wild, mid-concert rants Ye unleashed about Jay and his even-more-legendary wife, Beyoncé.
“Beyoncé, I was hurt! ’Cause I heard that you said you wouldn’t perform unless you won Video of the Year over me, and over ‘Hotline Bling,” yelled West at a California concert in November 2016. “In my opinion—now, don’t go tryin’ to diss Beyoncé, she is great. Taylor Swift is great. We are all great people, we are all equal. But sometimes, we be playin’ the politics too much and forgettin’ who we are—just to win. Fuck winning! Fuck lookin’ cool!”
“I’ve been sent here to give y’all my truth—even at the risk of my own life, even at the risk of my own success, my own career,” he continued. “I’ve been sent here to give y’all the truth. Jay Z, call me, bruh! You still ain’t call me! Jay Z, call me! Jay Z, I know you got killers, please don’t send them at my head. Just call me! Talk to me like a man!”
While promoting last year’s album 4:44, Jay addressed the Kanye rants.
“What really hurt me was, you can’t bring my wife and my kids into it… Like, Kanye is my little brother. He’s talked about me a hundred times. He even made a song called ‘Big Brother.’ We’ve gotten past bigger issues. But you brought my family into it, now it’s a problem,” said Jay. “You know it’s a problem because me and him would have been talked about it, been resolved our issues. And he knows he crossed the line. He knows. And I know he knows. ‘Cause we’ve never let this much space go between one of our disagreements and we’ve had many. That’s part of who we are.”
Despite a series of very public West meltdowns everywhere from TMZ to SNL, the hatchet appeared to be buried when West posted a (since-deleted) sunny photo of Jay and Bey to his Instagram account recently, accompanied by the caption: “Famleeeeee.”
