Music

Real Friends: A Primer On The Confusing And Bitter Feud Between Jay Z And Kanye West

So you can decide whose side you're on.

by Sinead Stubbins  24 October 2016

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July 2017: There are reports this morning that Kanye West is ditching Tidal because the Jay Z owned streaming platform owes him nearly $4 million. The escalation of the feud between the two rappers comes just days after Jay Z released his latest album, 4:44, which includes a track dissing Kanye and calling him “insane”.

2016 has been terrible for a variety of reasons, one of them being that this is the year friendship officially died. Vin Diesel and The Rock have pretty much ruined the Fast and the Furious franchise. Recent allies Taylor Swift and Kim Kardashian are now sworn enemies. And now we have a rift between Kanye and Jay Z — the breaking of a bond that many believed would be eternal.

The end, it seems, is nigh.

Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.

Why does this matter? Because if Kanye West and Shawn Carter’s friendship can’t make it, maybe no one’s can. If these two men — these former collaborators turned rivals turned best buds — can’t survive the changing tides of success, shifting marital statuses and the fluctuating trendiness of skinny jeans, then maybe friendship is really an illusion. Maybe friendship is just an arrangement of convenience and mutual interest. Maybe friendship is dead.

This is about the fragility of best buds. Okay, let’s analyse what happened.

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The Beginning: Kanye’s Big Brother

Kanye West and Jay Z started working together in 2001, when Kanye produced five tracks for Jay Z’s big comeback album, The Blueprint. Kanye became famous! He was one of the most celebrated hip hop producers in the game! But Jay Z and Roc-A-Fella were still reluctant to sign him as a rapper.

That didn’t mean that Jay Z didn’t respect Kanye. In his documentary about the making of The Black Album in 2003, Jay Z makes about seven different emoji faces when Kanye plays him the beat he made for ‘Lucifer’. “Kanye came and motherfucking did his job, didn’t he!” Jay says with joyful exuberance.

When Kanye’s debut album The College Dropout came out in 2004, it became an instant classic and he revealed that he was just as impressive at rapping as he was at producing. Even though he and Jay Z still collaborated — most notably on the ‘Diamonds From Sierra Leone’ remix in which Kanye says that he’s often asked “What’s up with you and Jay, man? Are y’all okay, man?” and Jay answered, “Yup! I got it from here, ‘Ye. The chain remains, the gang is intact”– at this point the buds of friendship had not fully bloomed.

Probably the best illustration of Kanye and Jay’s respected-co-workers-almost-friends dynamic was Kanye’s song ‘Big Brother’ off 2007’s Graduation. In it, Kanye says that Jay Z has always been his idol even if he kept him at arm’s length for a long time, mentioning in particular how hurt he was not to be invited to come on stage at Jay Z’s Madison Square Gardens ‘retirement’ show. “I guess big brother was thinkin’ a little different, and kept little brother at bay, at a distance,” he said of the snub.

The song is a very honest expression of the pressure of “walking in the shadow of a giant” who continually shows you up, but how this ultimately motivated Kanye to be a better rapper. But it also revealed that Kanye and Jay Z weren’t immune to petty feuds, specifically in that Kanye thought that Jay had copied him by collaborating with Chris Martin (lol, 2007).

As Kanye became bigger and began beating Jay Z in the charts (just as he promised in ‘Big Brother’), the two went from little and big brother to equals. When the two rappers released Watch the Throne in 2011, they were completely in sync. It was exciting to see two of the best challenge each other, knowing how to get the best out of one another. The way Kanye and Jay play off each other in ‘Ni**as in Paris’ — showing off, complementing each other, setting it up so the other could knock it down — is one of the greatest moments in the history of hip hop friendship, citation not needed.

Okay, ‘Otis’ was a close second.

It was assumed that Kanye and Jay weren’t just successful collaborators anymore, they were friends (well, apparently they argued for four days straight during the recording of Watch the Throne, but I imagine that’s just what being friends with Kanye is really like). But looking back at now, maybe they were never really friends. Maybe all that hugging in ‘Otis’ was for show (for one of them, at least — we’ll circle back to this).

Man, this is getting bleak.

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The Cracks Start To Show

Looking at Kanye and Jay Z’s relationship through the years, one thing becomes abundantly clear: maybe Kanye considers Jay Z a better friend than Jay Z considers Kanye. Even though now it’s quite standard to discuss Kanye’s infamous 2009 stage crash at the VMAs as a statement against the music industry frequently overlooking black performers, at the time of the incident and to this day, Jay Z doesn’t comment on what may have motivated Kanye (Beyoncé has managed to defend him numerous times without alienating Taylor Swift fans).

This is where it gets real petty. For the last few years, the internet has been obsessed with the idea that Jay Z and Beyoncé do not like Kanye’s wife, Kim Kardashian. This could be easily dismissed as just another way pop culture tries to separate the ‘good’ female celebrities like Beyoncé from the tacky or ‘bad’ celebrities like Kim, except that Jay did not attend Kim’s much Instagrammed baby shower or the couple’s wedding. In an interview with GQ, Kanye said: “It doesn’t even matter to me whatsoever, who would show up. Because the most important person to show up there, to me, was Kim. And that’s all that matters to me.” To internet sleuths, these seemed like very public and deliberate disses.

It may be a coincidence, but the last few years have also seen Kanye make a few digs at Jay’s work. “I got love for Hov, but I ain’t fucking with that ‘Suit & Tie’,” he said at a show in London. At some gigs in 2014, after Jay Z apparently declined to be the best man at Kanye’s wedding, Kanye omitted Jay Z’s name in the lyrics for ‘Cold’, ‘Blood on the Leaves’ and ‘Touch the Sky’.

How did it go so badly wrong? Remember how excited Kanye was when Beyoncé announced that she was pregnant with Blue Ivy? He was so excited!

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TIDAL, Apple Music and Drake

Earlier this year, Kanye and Jay appeared on an early version of Drake’s song ‘Pop Style’. Drake and Kanye have always had a pretty good relationship, with Drake frequently citing Kanye as his main influence and competitor and Kanye conceding that Drake’s popularity is now on par with his own.

“I’m the visual extension of what he’s doing sonically,” Kanye said in an interview with Zane Lowe. “I don’t have any advice for that young man. What I can say is run. Fly. Go as fast as you can. Don’t stop.”

For years there have been rumours that Drake and Kanye would collaborate on an album, with the pair seemingly confirming it at OVO Fest in August. When Kanye and Drake get together they do a lot of jumping, and if that’s not friendship I don’t know what is.

Jay Z and Drake on the other hand, have never really liked each other. So when ‘Pop Style’ came out and it featured a laughably brief cameo by Jay Z, as opposed to Kanye who rapped a whole verse, it seemed like the shadiest move in the world.

This leads us to the nail in the coffin in what we knew to be the Kanye and Jay Z friendship. At his concert in Seattle last week, Kanye was in the mood to air out his grievances, both professional and personal. First he expressed frustration at the red tape preventing him and Drake from recording their album. “Y’all ain’t get what y’all was suppose to get with me and Drake because of some Tidal/Apple bullshit,” he said.

“This shit got me tight. Every time I perform [‘Ni**as in Paris’] I think about this shit… I think about the politics and the bullshit. I think about how hard I go for music, for art, for y’all, the fans. How hard we go.”

He then revealed that Jay Z told him that he didn’t want to be on the song with Drake out of “respect” for Meek Mill, a rapper with whom Drake has extremely petty beef with. This seems very unlikely, as I can’t even imagine Meek Mill and Jay Z breathing the same air, let alone Jay Z publicly defending him. Kanye pushed Jay on it and called everyone involved, and then discovered that it was really a case of “some Tidal/Apple political shit about percentages on songs”.

This isn’t even the worst of it. Kanye also said that not only have Blue Ivy and North West never been on a playdate together, but Jay Z didn’t even visit Kim and Kanye after she was recently robbed in Paris. Jay is blocking his business and is avoiding him socially. Kanye is hurt and it doesn’t seem like this friendship will recover. “There will never be a Watch The Throne 2,” he said in finality.

Kanye says a lot of things. Sometimes these things are prescient and inspired, and other times they’re straight nonsense. But this speech didn’t feel like Kanye was being provocative for the sake of it; rather it sounded like someone who was fed up with their best bud being disrespectful and deceptive both publicly and privately. In the scheme of their checkered relationship, they seem to have reached an impasse.

Now Page Six have this weekend reported that Jay Z can only handle Kanye in “small doses” and that their camaraderie on Watch the Throne was just a moneymaking ploy. Is this the end for Kanye and Jay Z? Maybe we all need to make our peace with it. Real friends, there’s not many of us.

UPDATE 21/11/16:

During his concert in Sacremento over the weekend, Kanye seems to have deepened the divide between he and Jay Z … and also, Beyoncé? After performing only three songs (for which Ticketmaster are now offering refunds) Kanye talked for fifteen minutes about ‘Formation’ winning the Video of the Year at the VMAs. “Being perfect don’t always change shit, bro! I was hurt, Beyoncé! I was hurt!” he said.

“I wanted to present a video called ‘Famous’ and out of respect, MTV told me, ‘Mr. West, out of respect to you, I will let you know that Beyonce is winning the VMA tonight for ‘Formation’ over ‘Hotline Bling’ and ‘Famous’…. , Beyoncé, I’m hurt. Because I heard that you said you wouldn’t perform unless you won Video of the Year over me and over ‘Hotline Bling’.

Kanye also addressed Jay Z and again implored him to get in contact. “Jay Z! Call me, bruh! You still ain’t 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.” Today Kanye has cancelled his tonight’s show in LA.

Oh boy.