In 1995, The Notorious B.I.G. released a B-side called ‘Who Shot Ya?‘ and hip-hop changed. Two months earlier, friend-turned-rival Tupac had been shot five times in a robbery in Manhattan, and despite claims from Biggie that the song had been recorded before the incident, there was no escaping the implications in the song’s lyrics (“Who shot ya? Separate the weak from the obsolete” and “I’m Crooklyn’s finest/You rewind this, Bad Boy’s behind this” – hardly subtle). Tupac responded with a diss of his own, and the most famous feud in music was born.
The 90s were the glory days of hip-hop rivalry. Before the bullets flew, infamously, between East and West Coast, it was lyrics that made or broke careers. If earlier beefs involving the likes of KRS-One and LL Cool J had been the birth of the diss track, songs threatening serious violence like Tupac’s ‘Hit Em Up’, Mobb Deep’s ‘Shook Ones Pt. 2’ and ‘Who Shot Ya?’ represented its baptism of fire, pushing things in a new direction. Tupac vs. Biggie, Death Row vs. Bad Boy Records, Suge Knight vs. Puff Daddy; aggression was the new flavour of hip-hop, and it didn’t exactly hurt record sales either. Over the next 20 years, the players would change but the game would remain much the same.
Interestingly, perhaps the most notorious diss released after Biggie and Tupac’s deaths – Nas’ ‘Ether‘ – wasn’t aimed at the other side of America, but at fellow New York rapper Jay-Z, by then well-established but yet to release The Blueprint. A song of extreme vitriol which dripped homophobia and misogyny, ‘Ether’ nonetheless eviscerated Jay. With a hook consisting of a distorted sample of Tupac shouting “Fuck Jay-Z” between verses in which Nas accused him of stealing from KRS-One and hijacking Biggie’s legacy, the song was released on Jay’s birthday. It was the seminal, classic diss.
Around the same time, Eminem was changing the game. Unafraid to attack and offend pretty much anyone, including non-hip-hop targets like Moby, Christina Aguilera, Dick Cheney and, famously, his ex-wife Kim and his own mother, Em’s disses would often call out multiple figures in pop culture over the course of perhaps 16 bars before he turned his attention to something completely different (the best-known examples being ‘The Real Slim Shady’ and ‘Without Me’: “You waited this long, now stop debating/Cos I’m back, I’m on the rag and ovulating/I know that you got a job Ms Cheney/But your husband’s heart problem’s complicating/So the FCC won’t let me be/Or let me be me, so let me see/They tried to shut me down on MTV/But it feels so empty without me”).
It was this hyperactive, shameless assault on what seemed like anyone who came into Slim Shady’s consciousness as he rapped that made him so popular, though that’s not to say Eminem couldn’t lay down something more traditional and less erratic. He proved that during his feud with rapper/producer Benzino and The Source magazine during Benzino’s tenure as editor via ‘The Sauce’, a track often credited with destroying the publication’s credibility.
Nowadays the double effect of worldwide success – with the hundreds of millions of fans and also significant respect from other rappers that it entails – has meant that Eminem has toned things down and pretty much retired from sparring (with an unbeaten record, incidentally). Though his protégée 50 Cent has resolutely carried on his feud with Compton rapper Game, things are quiet at Shady Records these days. It’s a younger generation who provides the drama in hip-hop now.
In a sense, things are different from before. The most sensational “diss” in the last couple of years was Kendrick Lamar’s infamous verse on Big Sean’s ‘Control’, which wasn’t exactly a diss but more of a call-out to pretty much every young rapper on the scene right now in one breath (J. Cole, Big K.R.I.T., Wale, Pusha T, Meek Mill, A$AP Rocky, Drake, Big Sean, Jay Electronica, Mac Miller and Tyler, the Creator, to be precise). The internet suffered paroxysms of joy when the verse came out, followed by further joy at the responses of a number of the rappers named over the next few weeks, rising to Kendrick’s challenge. The verse was good-natured, though, if competitive, and to find real venom one has to look elsewhere.
Enter the G.O.O.D. Music-Young Money beef. Originating between veteran Common and YM golden boy Drake, their respective labelmates Pusha T and Lil’ Wayne were quick to get involved. The feud has bubbled under the surface for a few years now, surfacing openly every now and then to produce quality disses like Wayne’s ‘Ghoulish’, and Pusha T’s ‘Don’t Fuck With Me’ and ‘Exodus 23:1’. Pusha seems to go in harder than the others, for some reason (“Fuck you playing games for?/ Don’t be scared, get everything you came for/They got you talking that big shit/Little do you know we don’t miss shit/Them n****s using you as a pawn/You see they never loaded their guns/Now you out here all by yourself/Ask Steve Jobs, wealth don’t buy health”).
Common kills it on ‘Sweet‘ too, though he finds it hard to find new material to diss Drake with. After all, the Toronto rapper is hip-hop Marmite – you love him or you hate him – and he has beef past and present with almost everyone around. Everything that can be said against him already has, numerous times. Including open and veiled attacks in the media and on wax, Drake’s been dissed by Chris Brown, Common, Pusha T, Ludacris, Jay-Z, DMX, Kanye and even labelmate Tyga (“I don’t like Drake as a person. He’s just fake to me.”). Tyga’s attack, which extended to Nicki Minaj, is symptomatic of YMCMR’s tendency to fight in-house – Wayne’s rapidly-escalating dispute with label head Birdman is only the latest in a series of not-so-veiled shots within the label.
Where Pusha T is keeping the traditional diss alive and well, there are others dragging the proud tradition of hip-hop beef through the gutter. Self-proclaimed Queen of Twitter Azealia Banks has managed over the last two years to perfect the art of attacking other artists despite not actually releasing her debut album until this November. Of targets including Angel Haze, Action Bronson, Kreayshawn, T.I., Nicki Minaj, Jim Jones, A$AP Rocky and Iggy Azalea, only the last two really justified any attack from the vituperative rapper, and Bronson’s reaction to her was one of ridicule rather than any serious consternation. Most of the others pointed to her lack of a major hit besides ‘212’. Banks is proof that rappers can embarrass themselves by launching attacks, too.
Beef is an integral part of hip-hop. Much like how technology advances fastest during periods of warfare, so rappers improve and write better when they have something to prove and someone to put back in their place. That’s not to say advocating rivalry equates to advocating violence – the two biggest names in the history of the genre both had lives cut tragically short allegedly as a result of the East-West Coast feud, but even then it could be argued that their fame was enhanced thanks to it.
Ultimately, Kendrick has the right attitude on ‘Control’ – competition makes you raise your game and calling out those other rappers raised not only his profile but theirs too. It benefits everyone, not least fans of those involved, and should be lauded for happening now as it happened twenty years ago. Jay-Z put it best when he reminisced about Biggie in a 2012 interview with MTV, “You’re just as good as your competition around you. You know when someone else pushes you to really step your game up? That song, it was so crazy. It just had an effect on everybody. The world stopped when he dropped ‘Who Shot Ya’.”
