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Jay-Z Opens Up About His ‘Complicated Relationship’ With Kanye West: ‘He’s My Brother’

Kanye West Jay-Z
Kanye West and Jay-Z attend the 2012 BET Awards at The Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on July 1, 2012.Johnny Nunez/WireImage.com

One step at a time. Jay-Z opened up about his longtime friendship and feud with Kanye West in a wide-ranging interview with T: The New York Times Styles Magazine.

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“I [talked to] Kanye the other day, just to tell him, like, he’s my brother. I love Kanye. I do,” the Brooklyn native, 47, told the Times’ executive editor Dean Baquet for a profile published on Wednesday, November 29. “It’s a complicated relationship with us.”

Jay-Z continued, “Kanye came into this business on my label. So I’ve always been like his big brother. And we’re both entertainers. It’s always been like a little underlying competition with your big brother. And we both love and respect each other’s art, too. So it’s like, we both — everyone wants to be the greatest in the world. You know what I’m saying? And then there’s like a lot of other factors that play in it. But … we gonna always be good.”

Jay Z T The New York Times Style Magazine
Jay-Z featured on the cover of ‘T: The New York Times Style Magazine.’

The “Family Feud” rapper then confirmed that there has been some tension between him and West, 40, since the Chicago native lashed out at him during an onstage rant in October 2016.

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“But that happens. In the long relationship, you know, hopefully when we’re 89 we look at this six months or whatever time and we laugh at that,” Jay-Z said. “There’s gonna be complications in the relationship that we have to get through. And the only way to get through that is we sit down and have a dialogue and say, ‘These are the things that I’m uncomfortable with. These are the things that are unacceptable to me. This is what I feel.’ I’m sure he feels that I’ve done things to him as well. … I’m not a perfect human being by no stretch.”

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The 21-time Grammy winner went on to call the “Famous” rapper “a very compassionate person” who simply “gets in trouble trying to help others.”

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