Bow Wow has revealed that Nelly needed to be a “mediator” in his dispute with Jermaine Dupri when tensions were at a boiling point.
The “Let Me Hold You” hitmaker spoke about his and JD’s falling-out during a sitdown on Math Hoffa’s My Expert Opinion, and while he didn’t go into detail about the incident, he said that Nelly was forced to step in and help smooth things over during a recent studio session.
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“The best way to explain it without going way too deep into it — and I told him this because we had a real talk recently — last month, I pulled up to the studio, and Nelly had to be there to be the mediator,” Bow Wow said. “I said, ‘I’ll come inside when you there. But you gotta be there. You gotta be right in the middle of this shit.'”
He continued: “Nelly’s like an uncle, like a big brother. So I walk in and I told JD to my face like, ‘You like Star Wars so much, right? That’s what we is. You Obi-Wan and I’m Anakin.‘ That’s all it is. That’s the relationship.
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“I’m the young n-gga who wanted all the info. I’m ready to go, I’m ready to go and it’s, ‘No, Bow Wow…’ That’s all Anakin was. Obi was the teacher, Anakin was the student. When Anakin wanted to go out, get it cracking, ‘No, Anakin. Stand back, you not ready.’
“So that’s the whole thing is that we’re the same, very competitive. I’m smart because I learned from you, could potentially be even smarter because I had three n-ggas who I learned shit from. You had no one you learned shit from. So I learned from you, I learned from Snoop, I learned from Puff, I learned from Birdman. Like listen sometimes, but JD is stubborn though.”
The comments come after Bow Wow and Jermaine Dupri engaged in a very public dispute on social media last year, stemming from the latter expressing regret at having signed with the So So Def mogul.
Reflecting on his 2005 album The Price of Fame during a Q&A with fans on Twitter, Shad Moss said that one of his favorite tracks was “I’m a Flirt” because JD wasn’t involved in its creation.
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“Because it was w out jd. And it went number one w out jd. And i wrote it w out jd,” he wrote. “My whole career i had to over prove to folks im not to be played w. It was like kobe winning w out shaq. Even jd told me, ‘if u think u can do it w out me THEN DO IT’ welp i did.”
Things then escalated after Dupri claimed in an interview with The Goats and Underdogs podcast that he came up with the idea of 106 & Park and told BET’s then President of Programming, Stephen G. Hill, that Bow Wow should be a regular presence on the show.
“106 & Park was created by me,” the Atlanta hitmaker said. “I created the show for Bow Wow. I was watching MTV, and MTV had TRL. And they were catering to NSYNC and they were catering to Backstreet Boys and anything white that was coming out that was Pop. They was allowing these kids to scream and holler at them.
“And I was like, ‘Yo, we don’t have nothing for Black people like that. Like, where’s the Black kids that love music, why don’t they have a show like that?’ So I called Stephen Hill and I said, ‘Yo, I got an artist, we need to make a show just like TRL.’ And he said, ‘What’s the artist?’ And I said Bow Wow.”
He continued: “Everybody challenges what I’m saying. Mind you, they wasn’t gonna put Bow Wow on TRL like that because he was a rapper. He was a Black, little young boy rapping. But he also was 12 years old. Nobody on TV was 12 years old anywhere creating this type of pandemonium.”
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Bow Wow immediately disputed Jermaine’s comments, telling him to “stop the cap.”
“JD aint create 106&Park stop the cap,” he tweeted in response. “Stephen hill Rick Ghrimes & all the great people in the BET OFFICE & staff created that show. All i did was capitalize off of what they created and made it mine. I would know…. I am mr 106! I would never take away from someones creativity.”
