Now that you've had a week to really soak in all the revelations tucked into part one of Jay Z's expansive interview with Elliott Wilson (TIDAL editorial director, culture and content, hip-hop) and Brian "B.Dot" Miller, the Rap Radar podcast team are forcing you to cancel your Friday night plans with the release of part two.
Watch the second half of Jay's discussion above via TIDAL on Air, a new podcast network that offers TIDAL members unique content from a wide variety of industry personalities.
Jay opens part two with a discussion on the 4:44 track "Smile," which features a spoken word portion from Jay's mother Gloria Carter. "My mom has been dope her whole life," Jay said. "She's just a dope person. Listen to her, she sounds like Maya Angelou. Her pacing, her voice."
The interview also touches on Jay's newest children, twins Rumi and Sir. He explains the derivation of their names, and discusses planning his upcoming tour around their births. He also expresses pride in his recent induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame (though he says that they "might have missed" other hip-hop titans like Rakim, LL Cool J, and KRS-One).
"I was happy. I was happy for the culture," he said. "I take writing serious. The art of writing, things that work on multiple levels, that's hard to do... My approach to writing, I take it so serious that to be recognized on that level, it was one of those moments."
Jay, in line with his 2016 New York Times op-ed on the subject, addressed the racism inherent in enforcement of drug laws. He noted that Roc-a-fella co-founder Kareem "Biggs" Burke was sentenced to five years in prison for conspiring to distribute marijuana. "That really hurt me about Biggs," Jay remembered. "There are people in jail while people are making billions of dollars off weed. Everybody cool with that shit? No one's gonna talk about it? They had some ladies on the Today show talking about, weed makes them better parents. I'm like, oh shit! Nah, this man just did five years—you guys gonna just do this?"
Hov also discusses which of his albums is his Thriller and which is his Off the Wall, dealing with the aftermath of his nephew's death, and a whole lot more.
Part one of Jay's interview touched on his issues with Kanye West, the 4:44 recording process, and the influence of U2. Check out what else we learned in part one right here.
