Jay-Z Seems Cool Because He's Protecting His Hurt Inner Child

To really understand Jay, you have to know the story of him and his father.

So I’m in Jay-Z’s Maybach. It’s 2005. We’re heading to the studio to see Beyonce. And we’re talking about his father. Adnes “AJ” Reeves. Jay’s Dad is a huge part of why he’s become the man and the MC he’s become.

When Jay was young, he idolized his father. He told me he saw him as Superman. But when Shawn Carter was 11, his uncle got into a fight in the streets. He got stabbed and killed. After that Shawn’s father was obsessed with revenge. He’d get a call at 2 in the morning—Yo we just saw him—and he’d run out the door. In the madness, he got sucked into the streets and ended up leaving the home and the family. This was devastating for 11-year-old Shawn.

He told me he felt like, “Superman just left the crib? That’s traumatic shit. He was a good guy, it’s just he didn’t handle the situation well. He handled it so bad that you forget all the good this guy did. The scorn, the resentment, all the feelings from that, as you see, I’m a grown ass man but it’s still there with me.” Decades later, he’s still carrying that pain.

Being abandoned by his father was one of the most traumatic moments of his life. And it led to Jay becoming emotionally cold. He told me after that moment, “I changed a little.” He paused. “I changed a lot. I became more guarded. I never wanted to be attached to something and get that taken away again. I never wanted to feel that feeling again. I never wanted to be too happy or gung ho or too mad. I just wanted to be cool about it.”

He told me it’s there even in a romantic situation with Beyonce. He said, “It’s hard to let myself go all the way.” He meant like to fully unleash his emotions. The man was protecting his heart even from women who loved him.

We see Jay as supercool, and he is, but when we see Jay-Z as cool, part of what we’re seeing is a man who’s emotionally detached from everything and everybody. He’s detached in order to protect himself because even into adulthood, he was still traumatized and broken from his father leaving him when he was a boy.

In his father’s last days, as he was dying, Jay visited with him several times. They reconnected and Jay unloaded some his feelings. He got some closure from the heartbreak that shaped him. But I still think it’s the emotional detachment that makes him seem cool but it’s really him protecting his hurt inner child.

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