Kanye West has been beefing with former mentor JAY-Z since 2015. But he appears to want to repair their former friendship in a new tweet that Ye shared with his 30.7 million followers on Aug. 10. The 43-year-old presidential hopeful retweeted a video of Kanye and HOVA’s electric performance of “Otis” at the 2011 MTV VMA’s. A fan account reposted the perf vid on Aug. 8 with the caption, “Run up on Yeezy the wrong way, I might murk ya,” a lyric from “Otis.” Kanye retweeted it, along with a follow up with that read, “Miss my bro…real talk”
Kanye seems to have come back energized after a make or break family getaway to the Dominican Republic with wife Kim Kardashian and their kids. It came following a series of Twitter rants where he claimed she wanted to “lock” him up and he had considered divorcing her. Kim later explained that Kanye was having a bipolar episode, and eventually visited him on his Wyoming ranch. Their 24 hour reunion on July 27 left Kim sobbing and miserable looking, and she flew back to L.A. the following day. After returning from their marriage-repairing Caribbean getaway on Aug. 9, Kanye seems to be taking a positive step to fix his damaged relationship with Jay.
While Jay, 50, and Kanye had a brotherly relationship for many years, it became strained in 2016 when Ye very publicly lashed out at Jay and wife Beyonce during several concerts. At a Seattle tour stop following Kim’s terrifying Oct. 3, 2016 robbery at gunpoint in a Paris apartment, Kanye complained to the crowd, “Don’t call me after the robbery and say ‘how you feelin?’ You wanna know how I’m feelin? Come by the house. Bring the kids by the house. Like we’re brothers. Let’s sit down.” He added, “I can’t take this sh*t bro. Our kids have never even played together,” referring to his daughter North West, 7, and Jay and Beyonce’s daughter Blue Ivy Carter, 8.
Then at a Sacramento tour stop, Kanye made things public again with Jay and implied he had assassins at the ready. “Call me, bruh! You still ain’t calling me! JAY-Z, call me! Aye, bruh, I know you got killers, please don’t send them at my head! Just call me! Talk to me like a man!” Kanye wailed. Shortly thereafter, Kanye was rushed to the hospital in Los Angeles on Nov. 21, 2016 and put on a psychiatric hold. The last 21 dates of his Saint Pablo tour were then scrapped.
In April 2018, Jay said that Kanye would always be family to him, but didn’t indicate that their friendly relationship had been repaired. He told David Letterman on his Netflix series My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, “That’s my brother. We’re beyond friends. Like literally, my little brother is Kanye. And like your little brother, things happen sometimes.” A month later Ye told Charlamange Tha God that he’d been furious with Jay and Beyonce for not attending his May 2015 wedding to Kim in Italy. “I was hurt about them not coming to the wedding. I understand they were going through some things, but if it’s family, you’re not going to miss a wedding,” Kanye complained.
Kanye and Jay did come face to face at Diddy’s blow-out black-tie 50th birthday party in Dec. 2019. Video showed the two men giving each other a friendly smile as they passed each other in a crowded corridor. On July 20, 2020, Kanye suggested Jay should become his potential vice president. “You know who should be my running mate? Shawn Carter,” he told Z93 JAMZ radio personality Kris Kaylin, using Jay’s real name. That suggestion was met with radio silence from Hova’s camp. But maybe now that Kanye is talking more sensible things like missing their Watch the Throne days, it will help repair their friendship.