Rap beef fell out of the sky once again via social media on Wednesday afternoon.
After Kanye West announced he was changing his album title from Swish to Waves, and after Wiz Khalifa said that title is disrespectful to the incarcerated king of “Wavy” Max B, and after Wiz allegedly put the hashtag “#KK” somewhere on his Twitter (which according to Wiz is actually a type of weed and not a veiled shot at Mrs. West), Kanye spazzed out on Khalifa on the world’s stage.
A 35-tweet barrage (read them all here) was fired off by West (does he know any other way?), spanning a myriad of topics ranging from Ye claiming Wiz swagger-jacked Kid Cudi, to Ye mocking Wiz’s personal style (hello pot, meet kettle), to Kanye saying he is the reason Wiz’s son Sebastian exists.
Forgetting for a second how incredibly tasteless it is for Yeezy to suggest that his fling with Amber Rose — who would later become Wiz’s ex-wife — was the cause for the existence of Wiz’s child, even if there is a stitch of truth to it just from an Amber exposure standpoint. What Kanye was doing was symbolic of the era we live in.
What’s beef? I’ll tell you what beef ain’t:
Beef ain’t tweeting out all your best insults in a lame attempt at playing the virtual dozens. Beef ain’t running to Instagram to air out all your dirty laundry — subliminally or not — when you’re all of a sudden inexplicably incapable of expressing any creativity or urgency in the booth. Beef ain’t having 1,000 memes and cartoon videos with your rival’s head superimposed on the body of a person with no hands, thus simulating what a physical altercation between the two of you would look like. Yet those are the recent actions of Kanye, Meek Mill and 50 Cent, the first of which are seemingly duplicated by nearly every emcee in the game today.
Sidebar: This was amusing the first time, but quickly you realize how corny this is. And this was one of how many memes?
Kanye’s Twitter attack was met with little resistance by Wiz, which wasn’t to my surprise. The pride of Taylor Allderdice is hardly the confrontational type. But in 2016 (and 2015, ’14 and ’13 for that matter), what exactly constitutes a “confrontation”? Tragically, the mid-90’s lived on the other end of the spectrum, which resulted in far less desirable outcomes. As recently as the early 2000’s, beef was handled largely on wax, however if it did spill over into real life, you might see a scuffle ensure back stage at an award show.
In hindsight, this was beef nirvana. Just subdued enough to keep all parties unscathed without sacrificing authenticity; just intense enough to stoke the creative flames.
There’s still another layer to this paradox. We’ve all seen the fruit of manufactured beef in the past— Ye and Fif were like Picasso and Rembrandt with it in 2007. Isn’t it all too coincidental that Meek’s 4/4 mixtape dropped at the same time as this feud with 50 popped off? Of course, it was a jab at Curtis on that tape that jump-started 50’s meme machine. But given 50 Cent’s capacity to drum up publicity whenever possible, are we sure this tiff with Meek wasn’t just an elaborate ruse hatched in a boardroom weeks before? What about Kanye and Wiz? These two artists never crossed paths in the roughly eight years they’ve both been on, yet beef conveniently washes up on the shores just two weeks before Yeezy’s new album is slated to drop, while Wiz’s Rolling Papers 2: The Weed Album has been rumored to drop within a similar window.
Could it be that these rappers are simply capitalizing on the momentum that came with the territory? Perhaps. But we can’t be naive enough to assume every dispute between artists predates the release of a major project by happenstance.
So where does that leave us?
Ever since Jay Z famously emblazoned Prodigy “on that Summer Jam screen“, and with the advent of photo-friendly technology, rappers have repeatedly selected the smart phone over the booth as their weapon of choice.
Is it a matter of economics? Maybe— do all rappers have money for all that studio time? Is it laziness? Probably. A Twitter or IG rant is just easier. But what’s a hip-hop head to do?
As discussed many times on this site, hip-hop is largely centered around competition; nothing had the internet lit quite like Kendrick Lamar’s “Control” verse. But when rappers have conflict, it seems like fans who were once forced to hope their favorite emcees could survive a gun fight now must be forced to watch them cyber bully one another like high school girls. More and more, the diss track seems to be marginalized, if not squeezed out entirely.
It was only six months ago when Drake’s “Back To Back” diss of Meek was so impactful, it penetrated mainstream pop culture, in part because a large segment of the culture drivers were thirsty for this type of rebuttal (to the point that “Back To Back” actually became overrated). The reverberations were felt most heavily on social media though, which sort of reinforces the desire for rappers to air their grievances online.
Maybe rappers aren’t to blame. It could be that social media is such a juggernaut, it’s permanently changed everything, including how rappers negatively interact with one another. But if this paradigm shift represents the new normal, gangsta rap fans are losing. Most rappers became famous because (GASP!) they can rap. They’re not web designers and they’re not comedians. But fans have to wade through the histrionics all the same, while the diss record slowly fades away.
These are our options: high school bullshit or cold-blooded murder.
C’mon, hip-hop. Do better.