So when Jay-Z finally returned, a few days earlier than his record company expected, it was like hearing a hip-hop stock character coming back to life. On his new single, “It’s Okay (One Blood),” he announces yet again - and out of nowhere - that he has “no beef with Jay.” (A bit of it has, and deservedly so.) The Compton rapper the Game has followed a greasier strategy: he says things that could be construed as disrespectful, then quickly backtracks. on the cover, accompanied by the question, “Is he the Jay-Z of the South?”) Lil Wayne, the surging New Orleans rapper, sprinkles his rhymes with Jay-Z quotations, hoping some of Jay-Z’s reputation will rub off on him. paid tribute by sampling Jay-Z’s voice for one of his breakthrough hits, “Bring ’Em Out.” (Vibe magazine reaffirmed Jay-Z’s role as a hip-hop yardstick by putting T. But it’s no coincidence that nearly a decade after both of them became stars, they’re still in the same game. After a few years off, both Jay-Z and Diddy are releasing new music, both hoping to engineer triumphant comebacks. Still, their careers have often intersected, and now they’re intersecting again.
(From a recent video: “It’s your boy Diddy, I’m here at my local Burger King, about to order me a Whopper.”) Blige into stars, and more recently he has expanded his definition of hip-hop mogulhood to include running the New York marathon, appearing on Broadway, overseeing MTV reality shows and advertising fast food on YouTube. Diddy (as Sean Combs is now known) doesn’t get the same sort of respect: he’s an nth-rate rapper but a first-rate hustler he helped turn the Notorious B.I.G. Jay-Z long ago proved himself to be one of the greatest rappers of all time fans pore over his meticulous rhymes. And since then, they have come to occupy nearly opposite positions in the hip-hop universe. And to nonfans who only glimpsed them on magazine covers or when flipping past MTV, they probably seemed pretty interchangeable: a couple of flashy New York stars whose ubiquity was proof of hip-hop’s continuing rise.īut even then, no casual listener - let alone an uncasual one - would ever have confused the two.
In the late 1990’s Jay-Z and Puff Daddy (as he was then known) were two of the biggest names in hip-hop.