JAY-Z Talks Kanye West Friendship & Beef: 'You Brought My Family Into It, Now It's a Problem'

"He knows he crossed the line," Hov said. "We've never let this much space go between one of our disagreements, and we've had many.

 

JAY-Z's 4:44, is so much more than just another rap album. The 10-track, 36-minute effort finds the rapper baring his soul, letting listeners into the world he's concealed for so long. Since its release, Hov has spent the past few weeks dissecting the different layers of his latest offering in his TIDAL series, Footnotes, addressing everything from racism and masculinity to relationship woes. And in his first interview since the album's release, JAY-Z recently sat down with Rap Radar Podcast host Elliot Wilson for part one of his two-part interviews that was released Friday (Aug. 18) to further unpack the messages of 4:44, discuss the album's development process and address his feud with Kanye West.
Early on, he explained on 4:44 he wanted to recapture some of that creative magic artists possess early on.
"Just like from the beginning of someone's career and making that sort of album that really means something -- touches the culture like a touch point, moves conversation and just be really f---king good and sh-t -- it's, like, a hard thing to do because you're so removed from where you were in the beginning," he told the podcast hosts. "And I really had to like think about what I wanted to say on this album at the time, think about the next thing, what was the next thing that I wanted to say and I didn't want to just make an album to just put out music, I wanted to be important."