In a new video released along with his 4:44 album, Jay-Z has opened up about his relationship with Beyonce.
“This is my real life,” Popsugar reports the rapper saying in the video, “I just ran into this place and we built this big, beautiful mansion of a relationship that wasn’t totally built on the 100 percent truth and it starts cracking.”
He said, “Things start happening that the public can see. Then we had to get to a point of ‘OK, tear this down and let’s start from the beginning.’ It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
In the video, Jay-Z opens up about his relationship’s public ups and downs, including the incident in which his sister-in-law Solange Knowles attacked him in an elevator after the Met Gala in a track entitled “Kill Jay-Z.” He also said he and Beyonce listened to the entire album before anyone else heard it.
“We’ve been in that space where we just got to the place that in order for this to work, it can’t be fake — not once,” he continued in the video. “I’m not saying it wasn’t uncomfortable because obviously it was, but because we’ve been doing it for so long it was less uncomfortable.”
The deeply personal album about his relationship is reminiscent of Beyonce’s visual album Lemonade.