Jay-Z has given a rare interview as he prepares to return to the stage this summer. The wide-ranging sit-down with GQ broached various issues relating to his career, back catalog, and business empire, as well as rap beefs and hip-hop culture at large. Watch excerpted footage below.
After praising Kendrick Lamar’s performance at the 2025 Super Bowl halftime show, Jay went long on the beef between Drake and Lamar, positioning it in the context of the “four pillars of hip-hop”: breakdancing, graffiti, DJing, and battling. Other than battling, each of these has drifted from the center of hip-hop, he told interviewer Frazier Tharpe. “Breakdance,” he said, is “actually an Olympic sport. So that’s dead [laughs]. Graffiti, beautiful in certain places. It’s not part of hip-hop. The DJ was in the forefront. It was Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince. Eric B. and Rakim. You don’t even know the DJ for half of the artists anymore. And the last pillar is battling. We love the excitement and I love the sparring, but in this day and age there’s so much negative stuff that comes with it that you almost wish it didn’t happen.”
He lamented that stan culture forces fans to align with one side of a beef: “Now, people that like Kendrick hate Drake, no matter what he makes. It’s like an attack on his character.” The culture, he said, “could stand [the sparring] before because there was no social media. You had the battle and it was fun and then you moved on.” He suggested the content of diss tracks and surrounding conversations had gone “too far” by “bringing people’s kids in it” and “trying to tear down people’s lives.”
As well as pouring cold water on the perceived fallout between himself and former Roc Nation artist J. Cole, Jay said the war between Kendrick and Drake fans had fostered a counterproductive climate in rap. “I love the idea that we got so much music in such a short period of time,” he said. “Just everything around it was like, ‘Man, this is taking us a couple steps back.’”
His mixed feelings about the beef led him to question whether the last of those original pillars of hip-hop might be ready for demolition. “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.”
In a separate text to Tharpe, Jay linked antagonistic stan culture to the ascension of the far-right. “There is clearly an agenda to silence voices in our community, a heavy right wing agenda,” he wrote. “And the culture is happily playing along in the name of this insane thirst of Stan culture to have something on the other side.” He also accepted his own place in rap-beef legend: “I actually regret that because I really like Nas,” he told Tharpe of the two rappers’ turn-of-the-millennium duel. “I realize it’s a bit hypocritical because of how many battles I’ve been in, and given the nature of ‘Super Ugly.’ It takes growth to arrive at this place, because I’ve done the bullshit too!”
