Everyone loves a good rap beef now and then. It’s another way to get some drama into your life when the 2016 election season is lacking. I feel like in the past few months I’ve been living in some alternate reality, because the recent drama in the hip-hop community has been surreal to say the very least.
Rap beef in 2016 is much different than the ‘90s or even the ‘00s. While there have been a few high-profile diss tracks recently (Drake’s “Back to Back” is currently up for a Grammy), a lot of the beef ends up being some tweet or video online. It’s like some pro-wrestling feud: Rapper A disses Rapper B on the main stage, we then cut to Rapper B fuming offstage, who will then be on stage later and talk about Rapper A. The parallel between the two world was even acknowledged recently when Flo Rida competed in a rap battle (or at least, tried) on WWE. But this weird clip is only one of the several surreal happenings as of late. Here are some of my personal favorites:
Martin Shkreli v. Ghostface Killah
Martin Shkreli is probably the best example of a why people suck (price-gouging AIDS medicine, lying to investors), and recently took it to new heights. Context: he is the owner of the one-of-a-kind Wu Tang album, buying it for a price of $2 million. Ghost face Killah was asked about his thoughts, and Ghostface spoke his mind pretty casually, and called him a shithead (Good on you, Ghost). Normal situation so far.
Fast-forward to this week, and Martin Shkreli is sipping out of a glass in a video (probably watched some Bond movie and is trying to imitate one of the villains) and hanging out with a bunch of masked thugs. No, seriously. He proceeds to say he will wipe Ghostface Killah’s existence from the newest album (hopefully no producer would do such a thing) if he doesn’t submit a written apology to Shkreli. During all of this, Shkreli is basically asking to get punched in the face. Who the hell does he think he is? If he gave away the album to the people, maybe I would forgive him. But god, he really just sucks.
Just this week, Kanye announced he had changed the name of his upcoming album, which was previously “SWISH,” to “WAVES.” Twitter naturally started having fun, although serious criticism came from Wiz Khalifa, who claimed that the term was reserved for “wavy” rappers like himself and Max B. He ended his rant with “Hit this kk and become yourself.”
What makes this beef great is that it is actually some Shakespearean misunderstanding. “kk,” according to Mr. Khalifa, means “King’s Kush.” Kanye, however, read “kk” as the initials of his wife, and proceeded to rip into Wiz Khalifa (while simultaneously complimenting his cool pants), saying he still loves Wiz, and deleting all of the mean tweets. Kanye hasn’t said much (except for denying his interest in butt stuff, which is both funny and speaks to the still pretty prevalent homophobia in hip-hop) because he’s focusing on the album, but Wiz is continuing to diss Kanye at concerts. I don’t really care if any songs come out of this, I just want another Kanye twitter rant.
B.o.B v. Neil DeGrasse Tyson
Remember “Airplanes” playing at your high school dance? Yeah, so B.o.B., that guy. Turns out he’s also crazy. “Thinks the Earth is flat” kind of crazy. After dozens of tweets “debunking” the idea that the Earth is spherical, astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson stepped in and very handily debunked all his debunking. This culminated in a literal mic drop on The Nightly Show.
B.o.B. is still writing crazy stuff on Twitter. Most recently: “Since all mass media wants to make me look crazy and drag me through the mud…make sure you mention the cloning centers I talked about”. So why is he doing all of this? My personal conspiracy theory idea is to make more people watch X-Files.