JAY Z WAS 'REALLY HURT' BY KANYE WEST'S COMMENTS ABOUT BEYONCÉ

'HE KNOWS HE CROSSED THE LINE. I KNOW HIM. HE KNOWS.'

Last fall, Kanye West hit the road for his Saint Pablo Tour and shocked audiences when he called out his longtime friend and collaborator, Jay-Z, and Beyoncé in a brief — and pointed — stage rant.

The rant was rattling enough, but the personal nature of West's comments, specifically regarding how he "went down seven years" for his notorious outburst at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, cut a little deeper than your average bit of stage banter.

Jay-Z throws to the incident in 4:44 track "Kill Jay-Z" ("But you got hurt because you did cool by 'Ye/You gave him 20 million without blinkin'/He gave you 20 minutes on stage, fuck was he thinkin'?/"), but explains to Rap Radar just how intensely West's words affected him.

"What really hurt me, you can’t bring my kid or my wife into it. Kanye's my little brother," Jay-Z told Rap Radar. "We’ve gotten past bigger issues, but you brought my family into it, now it’s a problem with me."

He continued by saying that he believes West is well aware of the betrayal, and that the distance growing between them is a testament to that: "He knows he crossed the line. I know him. He knows. And I know he knows, 'cause we’ve never let this much space go between one of our disagreements, and we’ve had many. That’s part of who we are. That's what I like about him: He's an honest person. He's open, and he'll say things, and he's wrong a lot of times, and he'll confront it.""

He points out that the "disagreement" isn't the sole focus of "Kill Jay-Z," but clearly this fractured friendship is one that's hugely important to Hov — so maybe there's hope that they'll work things out now that they're back in the same city and months away from that tense night on the Saint Pablo tour.