Vince Staples feels a certain way about Spotify putting up a billboard that seems to spotlight the recent war of words brewing between Hip Hop’s “Big 3” of J. Cole, Kendrick Lamar and Drake.
Late last month, Spotify began running billboards in New York City’s Times Square that read: “Hip Hop is a competitive sport.” This coincided with K. Dot taking aim at Cole and Drizzy in his guest verse on Future and Metro Boomin‘s “Like That” from their collaborative album, We Don’t Trust You.
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On the latest episode of The Joe Budden Podcast, the Long Beach native called in to the show to share his thoughts about the beef and the way the music industry capitalizes off of it without actually helping.
“Even a 50-50 split of publishing in Hip Hop is something that comes from [the labels and companies] not respecting rap lyrics as actual songwriting, and them finding a way to make it fair, which makes the producers king instead of the songwriter being king,” he lamented.
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“And then we have every songwriter that we’ve ever had in Hip Hop music complaining about their publishing splits, but we kind of don’t pay attention to that. But once n-ggas get mad, the whole internet is activated and we got billboards from streamers talking about, ‘Hip Hop is a sport,’ but we ain’t never seen a billboard from a streamer that said, ‘Give that n-gga his publishing back.'”
He added: “Why are we at war with the n-gga that’s making a song and not the motherfucker who owns the whole thing? We don’t say their name at all. We quiet when they do some fuck shit.”
Vince’s addressed the problem with publishing around the 1:39:50 mark below:
Time for rap to be competitive again‼️ pic.twitter.com/tkYSBYiB2c
— RapCaviar (@RapCaviar) March 26, 2024
On the same episode, Joe Budden claimed that Drake and Kendrick Lamar are both in the process of preparing nuclear diss songs as part of their ongoing beef.
“Get out the way,” he said. “Whatever little rappy shit you thought was going on, this not that. And something’s coming. I think that J. Cole knows that from either Kendrick or Drake or both. And it was time to bow out, because now we are no longer in the first round.
“Kendrick has earned himself a bye with Cole’s apology, but I think that the insiders know— actually I have it on good information that both sides went in the booth and came out.”
He continued: “What I’m hearing about both sides is it’s nuclear. It’s up up. I’m hearing this from people that can rap, so I wanna come in here and say that speculation time is over. Debate time is over.
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“I’ve been saying for a few pods now that I’ve seen absolutely nothing from Drake to get me excited enough to think that he will be capable of doing what needs to be done against the likes of a Kendrick Lamar. I am here to say that there is no longer any need for me to instigate it.”
A few of Budden’s co-hosts noted that they heard one of the joints in question will be out this weekend.
