The ongoing civil war in hip-hop, with several major figures taking shots at Drake, has Cam'ron reflecting on his beefs with Nas and 50 Cent.
In a recent live stream hosted on Instagram, the Dipset rapper and It Is What It Is host looked back on his early '00s spat with Nas, who he considered one of his favorite artists.
"When Nas dissed me, that shit hurt. I was like, 'Damn,'" he recalled. "We grew up on Nas, man. 'What did Nas diss us for? Damn this is crazy.' So when he dissed me for no reason, I’m like, ‘Damn, I didn’t do nothing to Nas.’ But it was when I just signed to Roc-A-Fella and I was like, ‘Damn, man. Do we ignore Nas or do we respond to Nas?'"
Ultimately, Cam believed that he and Dipset's backs were against the wall, because they didn't have a platinum record to their name and were still a developing act at the time. "We had to do that, 'cause I'm like, 'Damn, we just getting in the door after a fucked up deal I had at Sony, our backs were against the wall.' I would never diss Nas for no reason," he continued. "That's why I did it."
Cam also reflected on his feud with 50 Cent, although he indicated that was a far more light-hearted and "fun" beef. "When me and 50 Cent was going on, that shit was fun," he said. "Shout out to my n***a 50, we good now, too. But when 50 dissed me, it started with an argument on the phone. 50 had said Koch [Entertainment] is the graveyard for a lot of rappers. At the time, Jim Jones had just went to Koch... and Jim Jones is Dipset."
For context, Nas flippantly dissed Cam's Come Home With Me in an appearance on Power 105.1 in 2002, which kickstarted the beef. Cam and Jim Jones responded by rapping over Nas' "Hate Me Now," which was included on Dipset's second mixtape, Diplomats Volume 2. They continued to go back-and-forth but eventually squashed their beef in 2014.
After Fif made the comments, he and Cam spoke on the phone, and as he tells it, things never really escalated. "All that shit to me was just music," he said. "Even when 50 and me spoke, he was like, 'Let's get to this money.' When we spoke, we laughed about that shit."
While it was more of a friendly rivalry, Cam still felt he needed to diss 50 Cent because he was "putting n****s out of business with his diss songs."
Cam gave the backstory on his two beefs so that he could circle back around to what's going on between Drake, Kendrick Lamar, Rick Ross, Metro Boomin, Future, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, and The Weeknd. Oh, and J. Cole is involved too, but he's already bowed out after deleting his Might Delete Later track aimed at K Dot. At least he warned us.
"What the fuck is this beef about going on today? What is this about?" Cam asked. "Everybody that’s rapping is rich. There’s beef and there’s rich. And it can’t be about no money. What’s the problem? I don’t get it. Could y’all tell me what this shit is about?" We should point out that when Cam and 50 were going at it, they weren't exactly slumming it.
Recently, the rap civil war got even weirder after Drake made the bold decision to use artificial intelligence technology to release a diss record directed at Kendrick Lamar from the perspective of Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg. Besides raising some questions about the ethics of using AI, impersonating a late rapper who was fatally shot and a rapper who is very much alive and could just record a verse if Drake really wanted him to, the song also saw Drake labeling Kendrick Lamar a coward for not releasing a response to his track "Push Ups" yet.
Ye also got involved with a remix of the track that started it all, "Like That." In an interview, he suggested that "everybody" in hip-hop is "very excited about the elimination of Drake." But as Cam said, they're rich anyway, so why do they care?
