How Jay-Z tricked his mother into featuring on a song
Jay-Z is not just one of the most powerful men in hip hop, but across the entertainment industry this century.
The East Coast hip-hop rapper turned record executive and businessman is a living legend, with the accolades to prove it. To list just a few of his extraordinary career; he is one of history’s best-selling music artists, and widely considered one of the greatest rappers of all time.
He has won 25 Grammy Awards (the most of any hip-hop artist), as well as three Emmy Awards and the NAACP’s President’s Award; he is the world’s richest musical artist, worth $2.6 billion as of 2025. And that is, of course, not to even mention the successes of his entertainment company Roc Nation, which includes genre-spanning artists such as Alicia Keys, Jay Electronica, and Rihanna amongst its roster.
His peerless success is just as internationally renowned as his rags to riches origin story. One of the nation’s most celebrated American Dream stories in real life, Jay-Z was raised in a public housing project in Brooklyn by a single mother, and has spoken – and rapped – about selling drugs and being shot at in his school years.
He has remained close with his mother, Gloria Carter, throughout his life. Her support for her son despite the difficulties of his childhood has remained with him since, and has been the subject of songs penned by the rapper.
She has, as keen Jay Z fans will know, even featured on a song of his: although not necessarily wittingly.
“I tricked her [into appearing on that],” Jay Z said in a 2010 interview with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. The song, December 4th, features on 2008’s The Black Album and is a deeply autobiographical track that is notable for featuring riffs from Gloria.
“I told her to meet me down at the studio and we were going to go to lunch. She came down to the studio, and I just brought the track up and I said, ‘I just want you to talk on it.’ Because I knew if I told her [she was going to be on the song], she’d get really nervous. [She said], ‘What do you want me to say?’ And the rest is history.”
Jay-Z also opened up about his troubled childhood on the radio interview. “It was a very intense and stressful situation,” he explained. “There was playing in the Johnny-pump (an opened fire hydrant) and the ice-cream man coming around and all of these games that we’d play, and suddenly it would turn just violent and there would be shootings at 12 in the afternoon on any given day. It was a weird mix of emotions. One day, your best friend could be killed. The day before, you could be celebrating him getting a brand-new bike.”
Unsurprising given his childhood and his subsequent wealth, Jay-Z is heavily involved in philanthropic efforts. Alongside Gloria, the rapper founded the Shawn Carter Foundation in 2003, which provides aid for students facing social and economic hardship through college.