No ‘family feud’ here. Jay-Z spoke candidly about how he and Beyoncé mended their relationship after the pair experienced marital strife.
“What is it about this marriage that’s so special, that you would fight this hard to save it?” CNN’s Van Jones asked Jay-Z during an interview with the music mogul on Saturday, January 27.
The “Made in America” rapper answered, “Well, that’s my soulmate. It’s the person I love. And you can be in love with someone, you can love someone, and if you haven’t experienced love and you don’t understand it and you don’t have the tools to move forward, you’re going to have complications, period.”
“And you can either address it or you can pretend until it blows up at some point, and for us, we chose to fight for our love, for our family, to give our kids a different outcome, to break that cycle,” the entrepreneur, 48, continued.
“For black men and women, to see a different outcome … it’s not just a celebrity couple. We were never a celebrity couple, we were a couple who just happened to be celebrities,” Jay-Z added. “We’re real people.”
As previously reported, video footage caught a moment between the songstress’ sister, Solange Knowles, and Jay-Z in a heated argument in an elevator after the 2014 Met Gala. Speculation began to grow that the rapper had cheated on his wife, and he seemingly addressed those rumors on 4:44, when he rapped on “Kill”: “You egged Solange on, knowing all along all you had to say you was wrong / You almost went Eric Benet, let the baddest girl in the world get away.”
Beyonce’s Lemonade also addressed the long-standing rumors of infidelity. In “Sorry,” she tells a cheating man to “call Becky with the good hair.” It was a lyric that Jay-Z also touched on in 4:44’s “Family Feud,” in which he raps, “Yeah, I’ll f–k up a good thing if you let me / Let me alone, Becky. A man that don’t take care his family can’t be rich.”
Jay-Z later told T: The New York Times Style Magazine in November 2017 that opening up about their relationship’s ups and downs in 4:44 and Lemonade helped benefit them as individuals — and as a couple.
He described the experience of listening to each other’s songs about their struggles – including cheating rumors – as “very, very uncomfortable.” The rapper also added: “the best place in the, you know, hurricane is like in the middle of it … We were sitting in the eye of that hurricane … The best place is right in the middle of the pain. And that’s where we were sitting. And it was uncomfortable. And we had a lot of conversations.”
The couple married in 2008, and share Blue Ivy, 6, and 7-month-old twins Sir and Rumi.
