One of the most buzzed-about songs on Jay-Z’s “4:44” album is “Smile,” in which the rapper’s mother, Gloria Carter, comes out as a lesbian.
Months after the revelation made global headlines, Carter reflected on the experience and her famous son’s emotional reaction to hearing the news, in a candid interview with the D’USSE Friday podcast.
“Me and my son, we share a lot of information, so I was sitting there and I was telling him one day, I just finally started telling him who I was,” Carter said in the interview, which first aired Tuesday. “Besides your mother, this is the person that I am, you know? This is the life that I live.”
Jay-Z, she added, “actually started tearing, because he was like, ‘That had to be a horrible life, Ma.’ And I was like, ‘My life was never horrible, it was just different.’ So that made him want to do a song about it.”
Still, Carter was apprehensive about sharing her private life on an album that would surely be heard by millions. “When it first happened, I was sharing myself [with him], not to share myself with the world,” she noted.