Jay implies he told something less than the whole truth in his various legal battles.

Hov takes a shot at the President, whom Jay supports and is friends with, for not being there when needed. Jay has recently shown that he’s not blindly supportive of Obama.

This could be seen as frustration on Jay’s part – the media and government don’t pay enough attention to the murder, crime, and poverty going on in the ghetto. This is very similar to Ice Cube’s complaint at the end of Boyz N The Hood, where he says:

Either they [the media] don’t know, don’t show, or don’t care about what’s going on in the hood."

Michael Jackson, with whom Jay worked several times, could aptly be described as a “tortured soul”, and would often wear costumes or disguises when out in public towards the end of his life.

Jay Z notably brought out Michael Jackson at Summer Jam in 2001.

Fittingly, these lines are about Biggie’s friend-turned-rival 2Pac, who was shot in an also-unsolved case on September 7, 1996. Shakur was shot multiple times while in the passenger seat of a car while he was in Las Vegas to attend a boxing match.

Shakur famously stayed alive for six nights after the shooting, but ultimately passed away on September 13th. Tupac and his label head Suge Knight twenty minutes before the shooting, below:

Note how Jay doesn’t say “he” died in Vegas, he says “it”. While “it” could be many things, the most likely explanation is it is a continuation of the first 2 bars in this verse, and Jay’s way of saying Pac’s death partially killed his big dreams. It makes sense, since this verse essentially shows Jay’s soul/dreams falling apart piece-by-piece through each tragic event, until he arrives at the finale close to defeated.

This idea of people literally losing their religion due to unanswered prayers and tough times is a recurring idea in Hov’s catalog, most fully addressed on the 2011 song “No Church in the Wild” in lines such as this one

The words “church is the flakiest” may be a reference to the Rev. Floyd Flake , pastor of Allen African Methodist Episcopal Church in Queens, who was indicted on embezzlement and tax evasion charges in the early 1990s, only to have the charges dismissed. Now that’s teflon…

Jay explained this line himself in Decoded

The churches really were the flakiest, whether they were storefronts or big old-school churches with vaulted ceilings and steeples. They were kept alive with the donations of poor folks and hadn’t seen a paint job in a minute. But more than that, they were full of fake prophets and money-snatching preachers. When your prayers aren’t answered, you start to think that maybe there’s no one there to answer them. Day after day, year after year, generation after generation, the response seems to be silence—it tests your faith.