Riri🫶🏽

JAY-Z doesn't like the direction stan wars are taking right now. “It’s too far. It’s bringing people’s kids in it. I don’t like that. I sound like the old guy wagging his finger, but I think we can achieve the same thing, as far as sparring with music, with collaborations more so than breaking the whole thing apart. It could stand it before because there was no social media. You had the battle and it was fun and then you moved on. Right now, I don’t know if it could stand it with the technology that we have. It takes up so much oxygen. It’s like trying to tear down people’s lives. I don’t know if it’s worth it at this point. I love the idea that we got so much music in such a short period of time. Just everything around it was like, “Man, this is taking us a couple steps back.” We’ve just grown so much that—I guess I’m going to say it—I don’t know if battling needs to be part of the culture anymore. We grew from breakdancing. We love graffiti. Before, the MC’s job was to bring attention to the DJ…. I want to hear what the rapper is saying. Now the last pillar is battling, and these are all the things that come with it. I hate that I have this point of view on it. I do. Because I know what it sounds like. It’s just how I feel about it. [“There is clearly an agenda to silence voices in our community, a heavy right wing agenda,” Jay said later in a text. “And the culture is happily playing along in the name of this insane thirst of Stan culture to have something on the other side. We are in a strange time. I’m curious as to how this plays out!”] 🔗 gq.com/story/jay-z-co…

Presenting GQ’s April issue: Shawn Carter on 30 years of Jay-Z He’s kept his thoughts to himself for the better part of a decade. But here, in a rare and exclusive interview, the legendary rapper put everything on the table—music, family, money, and the 30 years since Reasonable Doubt: britishgq.visitlink.me/bM3G1B

#JayZ covers British GQ. In an interview with them he speaks on the lawsuits he received in 2025. He says he was “heartbroken”. “That whole [lawsuit thing], that shit took a lot out of me. I was angry. I haven’t been that angry in a long time, uncontrollable anger. You don’t put that on someone –that’s a thing that you better be super sure. It used to be like that. You had to be super sure before you put those kind of things on a person. Especially a person like me. Even when we were doing the worst things, we had those kind of rules. There was a line: no women, no kids. You hear those sayings, but those are the things that I took from the street. We lived and died by that. So it’s strict for me, like it meant a lot to me. I took that really hard. I knew that we were going to walk through that because, first of all, it’s not true. And the truth, at the end of the day, still reigns supreme.”