Lupe Fiasco has responded to Joe Budden after he trashed his recent André 3000 remix.
Taking to X (formerly Twitter) on Wednesday (November 29), the Chicago rapper called out Budden directly by writing: “We don’t chase what’s been already achieved. Victory laps sometimes look like qualifiers especially from the stands @joebudden. New Blue Sun now streaming on all platforms.”
His post, which has since been deleted, included images of their respective career statistics, comparing Lupe’s 5.5 million monthly Spotify listeners and one Grammy win and 12 nominations to Budden’s 726,000 monthly Spotify listeners and zero Grammys and two nods.
Budden then responded to Lupe, stating he has no problem with the Food & Liquor lyricist but wants people to stop praising André 3000’s entirely instrumental flute project.
“Lupe is him,” he wrote. “That flute shit was worse than ass… 2 things can be true… stop lying to your favorite artists for 2024, you might get better product.”
Any simmering tension between the two was quickly snuffed out, though, as Lupe Fiasco and Joe Budden later spoke privately and hashed things out.
“Spoke to Lupe, i still love him. lol,” Budden wrote, to which Lupe responded with a thumbs up emoji.
The back-and-forth between the pair began last week when Lupe Fiasco posted a clip on social media of him rapping over “I Swear, I Really Wanted to Make a ‘Rap’ Album But This Is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me This Time,” the intro to André 3000’s New Blue Sun album.
Some of the lyrics over the beat include: “I prefer Kintsugi pottery over pristine, perfectly-weaved sophistry/ I’m bodhisattva possibly ’cause being bothered don’t even bother me/ But not a Buddha ’cause I ain’t got the modesty/ What you miss mentally is how much I catch bodily.”
After hearing the remix, Joe Budden dissed Lupe on his podcast, saying: “Hey Lupe, man, stop. Stop it. He rapping over them damn flutes. I cut that shit right off.”
As one of his co-hosts started playing the remix, the outspoken podcast host joked: “Oh Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Yo dawg, it’s women listening… with vaginas. Please.”
He continued: “Why would he do that to that to them? I can’t say nothing ’cause he gonna diss me […] That was some bullshit. That was some clout chasing.”
Next Andre 3000 will be playing the flute instrumental of Stevie Wonders’ “Happy birthday to ya” and bloggers will call that bs a classic in the making. Bahahaha
I don’t think the flute album is ass, but you really need to be in the right headspace for it. It’s a decent ambient jazz album, but certainly not the classic some folks are pretending it is. The replay value is little, though I don’t really think that’s what he was chasing to begin with.
Wtf? #
The honest truth is that creativity left dude. That’s why he don’t have sick lyrics to spit anymore. Bahahaha
Yet every other year he drops a verse on some random song that typically steals the show (latest example “Scientists and Engineers” a few months ago). He dropped a f’n flute album for Christ’s sake, so I don’t think it’s lack of creativity keeping him from rapping. Seems like it just doesn’t sound fun to him anymore which is kinda what he’s been saying for the past 10+ years….
Joe wasn’t speaking on Andre’s album, he was speaking to Lupe’s rapping over the it.