Back in 2009, a brewing feud between Method Man and Joe Budden turned physical when Raekwon’s crew assaulted the latter in his dressing room at a tour stop. The feud between the two MCs started after Joe questioned Method’s placement on Vibe’s Best Rappers of All Time list.
During a sit-down with Math Hoffa on his barbershop conversation series My Expert Opinion, Method Man reflected back to that time, and spoke on how avoidable the entire ordeal was. He said before Raekwon’s fight, he actually ran into the Joe Budden Podcasthost in Long Island and admitted he planned to “snuff” him.
“So he’s trying to say something in my ear,” Meth recalled. “I heard a couple of words but then I see this white boy filming on his camera. So now my focus is there, I don’t even hear what Joe’s saying. I go to snatch the shit out his hand. Now I know the wolves are hungry ’cause they start pounding on a n***a, ‘Stop, stop, what y’all doing? We’re in Long Island.’”
He continued, “Me and Joe, after that whole shit happened...they disappeared. Smart. Good. You should. I would have done the same shit. I go to walk back toward the van like, ‘Joe, I wanna talk to you. Where you at? Okay, I’ll go over here.’ We walk over there, we go behind the van. Now Joe, you don’t know this, but the whole time you were talking, I was gonna snuff you. But the reason why I didn’t, in that moment, was ’cause you said some real shit. Now, I don’t know exactly what it was word for word and shit, but it was definitely something that made me think in that moment, ‘Joe’s a very smart motherfucker. Chess, not checkers.’”
Method elaborated that from there, saying he sought to defuse the situation once and for all, but claimed Joe kept ragging on his Wu-Tang affiliates and that’s what ultimately led to a Raekwon affiliate “slapping” him during a 2009 Rock the Bells tour stop.
“It got to a point where I’m talking to him like, ‘You a talented motherfucker,” Method Man explained. “You don’t need to go this route with all that dumb shit. But I’m telling you, after this moment, if there’s any more bullshit, my hands are tied. I don’t know if he acknowledged that shit now that I think about it. I don’t think he did, because later on that day, he did some kind of interview or some shit like that, or some freestyle or something. He named [Inspectah] Deck and he named Rae.”
He continued, “I think he came from that environment where that’s what n***as did, but it was never taken to a point where somebody put hands on somebody. You know how n***as talk amongst each other and shit, ‘Fuck you, bitch ass n***a.’ In a different kind of setting though, fighting words, period. Joe, like I said, he’s just a smart motherfucker and that shit could have been so avoided, ’cause I spoke to him, me and him spoke. He knows this shit.”
Joe Budden spoke out the same year and said the move by Raekwon’s crew wasn’t smart.
“Them n***as came in here with a goal,” Budden said to MTV at the time. “The goal was to catch the blog king slippin’ and have the big 6-foot-4, 300 … n***a punch me in my eye. I guess it makes me look soft? I don’t really know. My thing is … no comment man. Maybe the n***a watches Joe Budden TV. But I’m all right, I’m safe — still sexy, I think. Eye is a little swollen.”
Watch Method Man speak more on the feud up top, and catch other clips from the My Expert Opinion session below.
