American Hip-Hop Icon and entrepreneur Shawn Cartel, popularly known as Jay Z have finally opened up about his emotional response to his mother, Gloria Carter, finally able to live her truth. In a new clip released from his forthcoming interview with David Letterman on Netflix series My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, Jay-Z recalled how he cried tears of joy after his mom came out to him as gay.
According to him, last year, his mother came out as a lesbian and the development inspired him to write ‘Smile’, a track on his ‘4:44’ album.
“Imagine having to live your life as someone else and you think you’re protecting your kids. And for my mother to have to live as someone that she wasn’t and hide and protect her kids … [she] didn’t want to embarrass her kids for all this time. And for her to sit in front of me and say, ‘I think I love someone…’ I mean, I really cried. That’s a real story,” JAY-Z recalls.
“I cried because I was so happy for her that she was free. This happened eight months ago when the album was being made. She told me. I made the song the next day,” he says.
Watch the video below:
In the third track off his 13th studio album, the father of Blue Ivy, Rumi and Sir raps:
“Mama had four kids, but she’s a lesbian/ Had to pretend so long that she’s a thespian/ Had to hide in the closet, so she medicate/ Society shame and the pain was too much to take.”
He also admits later in the heartwarming track that his mother found love:
“Don’t matter to me if it’s a him or her/ I just wanna see you smile through all the hate/ Marie Antoinette, baby, let ’em eat cake.”
JAY-Z also told Letterman that he knew about his mother’s love life for a while before she sat him down for the talk.
“I knew but this was the first time we had the conversation. And the first time I heard her say she loved her partner,” he remembers. “Like, ‘I feel like I love somebody.’ But she said, ‘I feel like,’ she held that little bit back still. She didn’t say, ‘I’m in love.’ She said, ‘I feel like I love someone.’ And I cried.”
Adding, “I don’t even believe in crying because you’re happy, I don’t even know what that is. What is that?”
Last September, Gloria revealed how she came out to her famous son.
“I just finally started telling Jay who I was. Besides your mother, this is the person that I am. This is the life that I live,” she told Dusse Friday. “So my son started actually tearing. He’s like, ‘That had to be a horrible life, Ma.’ I was like, my life was never horrible. It was just different, so that made him want to do a song about it. The first time I heard the song I was like, ‘Eh, I don’t know dude. I ain’t feeling that.’”