During an appearance on the latest episode of Drink Champs, Juelz Santana opened up about last year’s Verzuz between Dipset and The LOX, admitting that the iconic battle proved why the latter is the superior hip-hop group.
“My take on that night is [The LOX] are a better group than us because they are a group [The Diplomats] is not a group,” Juelz explained in the clip below. “We are individual artists that came together as a collective to form what we formed, which is called Dipset.
“They came in this game as LOX, they perform as a group,” Juelz added. “Me and Cam have great records together, but we don’t have those back-to-back records like Styles P and Jadakiss.”
Elsewhere in his conversation with N.O.R.E. and DJ EFN, Santana reflected on his past addiction to lean, revealing that Paul Wall put him onto the cough syrup, which would ultimately affect his music for a period of a time in the late-2000s.
“I was drinking lean and did I have an addiction to lean? For sure,” he said as seen in the below clip. “I was addicted to the point where I was drinking it every day and if I would’ve stopped, I would’ve gotten sick because that’s what happens with the opiates and shit.”
Juelz continued, “Paul Wall, he just said in an interview that Dipset embraced him a lot and we did. He kind of introduced me to it a little bit, just on some taste it...He put me on and you know, me and Wayne being close and recording that album at the time didn’t help. We were just fully not feeling our face all around the board. You see the music we created was fucking timeless. Lean ain’t have nothing to do with it. All of that was created when I was drinking the most lean I drank in my life.”
Juelz also reflected on Dipset’s reign in the early-2000s. While discussing the group’s time at Roc-A-Fella, which sparked a feud between Cam’ron and Jay-Z after Dame Dash signed the former to the label in 2002, Santana detailed how Cam ran his corner of the Roc “like a real business.”
“We came over there and we handled business,” he shared at the 32”20 mark. “Cam ran that shit like a real company, a real business, a real boot camp damn near. We went over there and it was a lot of things going on and basically, people weren’t taking advantage of the situation that they were in. So Cam made sure that we did and we made sure that we did being over there.”
The Diplomats’ tenure with Roc-A-Fella put Dipset in the middle of a feud between Dame Dash and Jay-Z, which ended with Def Jam purchasing the label in 2004, with Jay-Z eventually becoming CEO and President of the Roc.
“The Roc-A-Fella shit, you seen what happened with them,” he said at the 1:47:15 mark. “It was almost like a pick a side thing. Jay and Dame split, whatever that thing was, I don’t know. Jay and Dame split down the middle and that led to pick a side. Dipset was always on Dame’s side.”
Despite the past friction between him and Cam, Juelz maintained that the two are “in a great space.”
When asked by N.O.R.E. to describe his relationship with Killa Cam, Santana said, “Me and Killa are brothers. Fuck you mean ‘Have we ever had problems?’ You and Capone ever had problems?”
He added, “Right now, me and Killa are in a great space but we’re brothers, we’re always going to have things. The best thing about our relationship is we’ve always managed to sort it out and get to a better place.”
Watch Juelz Santana’s full appearance on Drink Champs above.
