Redman is going strong with his ‘J@Q BOI BE@TZ’ freestyle series, and jacked JAY-Z‘s “What More Can I Say” instrumental for his latest offering.
Bringing it back to the mixtape era, the New Jersey emcee’s new series finds him dropping verses over beats from some of his favorite songs. For his latest, posted on Sunday (October 15), he used Hov’s 2003 cut from The Black Album to spit some new fire.
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“I’m a Goliath, I even gave Connie tongue/‘Cause I was born in Bricks from out a rowdy bunch,” he raps. “This is Hip Hop, it’s like it’s meant for me/And I plan to finish it strong like Mister Cee!”
Check out the freestyle and its accompanying visual below.
Redman and JAY-Z have a relationship that dates back decades. In 1998, Jay released the multi-platinum album Vol. 2… Hard Knock Life and recruited his then-labelmates Red, DMX and Method Man for the Hard Knock Life Tour the following year.
Redman has often referred to that tour as the “most historical” tour in Hip Hop. During a 2020 conversation with HipHopDX, he explained it wasn’t only the incredible artists who made it unforgettable.
“I say that not only because of the amazing artists that was on the tour but because of the energy we produced,” he told DX. “We was all under the same label. We all had albums out that was doing very well. We all respected each other, number one.
“What we created on the road was a family, a family of energy and getting money and competition as well. At the time, we was going out a little bit earlier than a lot of the other groups. Sometimes we would go out there and people were still folding up chairs, putting chairs down and shit.”
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In fact, Red and Meth’s sets were so explosive, Jay and X felt inspired to step their game up, too.
“We still had an audience in the outer regions of the stadium because we were packing 60,000, 70,000 a night,” Redman continued. “That middle floor was always half full when we went out there, but the rest of the stadium was a little bit packed. We had to really put on a show when me and my boy came out to really open up for JAY-Z and DMX.
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“We came out there and we shut the building down. Even from the top tier, from JAY-Z and them, they would hear about our show. They even watched our show one time, like, ‘Let me see what these guys doing, what people are talking about.’ They’ve seen us flying through the air on our harness and all this shit. They was like, ‘Oh, we got to turn up.’
“We actually competed in seeing people shows turned up for the better because of each other. We looked at their show and we’re like, ‘You know what? We’re going to have this in our show too.’ It was a great competition. It was family. Most of all, the fans got an experience that they still talk about to this day.”
