Nas’ younger sibling Jungle almost got into a fight with 2Pac and the Death Row crew at the MTV Music Awards in the ’90s, the brothers revealed in an interview on Apple Music 1’s Rap Life Radio.
Speaking with Ebro Darden for a conversation premiering today at 1 p.m. ET, the brothers opened up about the altercation Jungle found himself in after he loudly proclaimed his loyalty to Mobb Deep in the presence of Pac.
“I'm in the seats at the spot. And somebody came and said, 'Yeah, your brother and them is getting it on in the lobby or whatever,' or something like that," explained Nas. "So I got up and I went out there, but it was already squashed at that point." As his brother told it, Nas was presenting an award at the time, so he went to grab a beverage as that went down.
“I went to get a drink and I saw this girl that looked lost,” Jungle said, adding that he wasn’t even 20 at the time of the incident. “So I'm like, 'Where are you going?' She's like, 'I'm looking for my friends.' I said, 'Who?' 'Death Row.’ I was like, 'What? When I see one of them, I'm going to take a chain.' And then she was laughing. I was trying to make her laugh to come get a drink with me. But I was on some Queensbridge Mobb Deep shit. It's like, yeah, Mobb Deep in the house. I'm going to take a chain."
Not long after, Jungle and the woman he was with noticed the Death Row crew coming their way. “I yelled it out, ‘Yo, Mobb Deep in the house. I will take a Death Row chain,’” he said. “They came right back with Pac, and he’s looking like, ‘Who said that?’ … And I was like, ‘Oh god.’ And I was with his guy, Moose, and Moose was like, ‘Man, yo, I got you. I see everybody and they don’t even know I’m with you.’ And he’s like this karate expert from Queensbridge. … I said it again, ‘Mobb Deep, what’s up Pac? What’s up? I’ll take your chain right now.’ And then they surrounded me again. They surrounded me, all, ‘What’s up with you? All it is. And Death Row, we here to die. You don’t know Death Row.’ They had razors in their hands, everything.”
2Pac and Mobb Deep were involved in a vicious back-and-forth in the mid-’90s, and as fellow New Yorkers, both Jungle and Nas were firmly in Havoc and Prodigy’s corner. The beef notably reached a peak with 1996’s “Hit ’Em Up,” which ends with a vicious reference to Prodigy’s battle with sickle cell disease.
Elsewhere in the interview, Nas touched upon the possibility of working on another album with Hit-Boy, who produced the entirety of King’s Disease and its sequel. “He’s like my Quincy [Jones], you know what I mean?” said Nas. “So I feel like the next thing I do, if I was to work with Hit-Boy on the next thing I do, I think that we might do something that is going to be magical. I think what we have is magic. … I think if we do another one, I’m excited about that idea, but you know, we’re celebrating this one now.”
Check out the full interview on Apple Music 1’s Rap Life Radio here any time after 1 p.m.
