Posted by A diss track Nas recorded 25 years ago called “Real N-ggas” has surfaced online. His target? The late Hip Hop legend Tupac Shakur who beefed with the Illmatic mastermind prior to his September 1996 death.
About midway through the verse, he spits, “From tube-socks in Timbs to blue rocks and Benz/Who got the ends, the type of n-gga 2Pac pretends/To all n-ggas who shine, guess who got revenge.”
The track is preceded by a sample of Nas’ opening bars from 1996’s “The Message,” the track that initially sparked their discourse.
2Pac took shots at Nas on the Makaveli cut “Against All Odds” with lines such as, “This little n-gga named Nas think he live like me/Talkin’ ’bout he left the hospital, took five like me/You live in fantasies, n-gga, I reject your deposit.”
He later accused Nas of adopting his entire persona with, “Hey Nas, your whole damn style is bitten/You heard my melody, read about my life in the papers/All my run-in with authorities, felonious capers/Now you want to live my life, so what’s a ‘chazzer’ Nas?”
As previously mentioned, the tension between Nas and 2Pac erupted following the release of “‘The Message” from Nas’ 1996 album It Was Written in which he raps, “I got stitched up, it went through, left the hospital that same night, what,” a reference to the infamous 1994 Quad Studio shooting in which 2Pac was shot. Nas later clarified it wasn’t intended to be a to diss and the two ultimately made amends.
Nas addressed their beef last August while doing promo for his Grammy Award-winning album King’s Disease. While speaking to Beats 1 host Ebro Darden, he talked about the moment they ran into each other backstage at the 1996 MTV Vide Music Awards. was asked about Snoop Dogg’s version of the story.
“I’m walking backstage and I see him and I’m like, ‘Yo, alright, do your thing’ and he said, ‘And you do yours’ because he knew where I was coming from wasn’t an all love place ’cause there was a rumor of Makaveli coming out,” he explained. “So I was really wanting to check the temperature with him but it turned up, my brother and them, they seen ’em and the Outlawz — shout out to the Outlawz — and they had some words or whatever.”
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He added, “We had a great convo, man. He explained he thought I was dissing him on the song ‘The Message.’ He thought I was dissing him and I heard he was dissing me at clubs. [Pac was the] last person I was even thinking about when I wrote that record. I was just going at everybody. So, he thought that.
“He was like, ‘Yo Nas, we brothers, man. We not supposed to go through this’ and I was like, ‘That’s what I’m saying.’ We had a plan to squash it in Vegas, so I was out there when he was in the hospital and praying for him to come through. Rest in peace to ‘Pac.”