Rapper Jay-Z is finally opening up about the shooting of his brother when he was 12.

Popeater reports that Jay, whose birth name is Shawn Carter, admitted to opening fire on his brother Eric as he watched him desperately feed his crack addiction.

“I thought I’d go to jail forever,” Jay admits to the Guardian. “I was a boy, a child. I was terrified.”

Jay was never charged for the shooting as his brother never pressed for legal action. The brothers made amends when Jay visited him in the hospital and Eric apologized for his crippling addiction.

Jay raps about the event on his second album on a track called “You Must Love Me.” Jay raps “Saw the devil in your eyes, high off more than weed, confused, I just closed my young eyes and squeezed.”

…and now Jay-z is worth about a quadrillion million dollars. I guess things worked out in the end after all!

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In an interview with CBC radio’s Q, Jay-Z (Shawn Carter) discussed the current state of hip hop, and how it needs to progress through maturity.

“There’s been this reluctance to mature in hip hop and when you do that, you leave the audience very narrow. My whole thing is to expand the audience and the genre of music in any way, because music is music,” he said.

Jay-Z’s rise to success came a long time before his music began to mature. The artist has released platinum albums throughout the 90’s and early 21st century, and with his latest album, “The Blueprint III”, Carter surpassed Elvis Pressley’s record for total number one singles by a solo artist.

Hip hop’s history is so young that many of the artists who popularized it over 20 years ago are still icons of the present genre. The difference is that when they began in the industry they rapped about legitimate struggles in their life at that point, but when they all became millionaires, and continued with the same style and stories, the music lost its authenticity.

“In the beginning, it was at its purest form because everyone was struggling. All great music and all great art, I believe, comes from pain. As hip hop started to get successful, and really successful — you had these guys coming from these neighbourhoods that were now millionaires — it’s tough to draw back to that place [of creativity].”

Jay-Z, who turns 40 in December, performed in London, Ontario on Friday and then headed to Toronto to perform a show at The Air Canada Centre on Halloween night.

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