Joe Budden has weighed in on the speculation that Drake's hit song "Janice STFU" is actually about him.
As with all of Drizzy's newly released material — consisting of three full-length albums, which debuted at the top three spots on the Billboard 200 chart — "Janice STFU" has sparked a lot of speculation on who the Canadian rapper is subliminally dissing on the track.
The allusions to his 2024 beef with Kendrick Lamar is immediately obvious, but others have suggested that he could be dissing rapper-turned-podcaster Budden — this after an old clip of Budden saying his "white name" is Janice recently resurfaced — or Jay-Z.
During a recent stream, close Drake ally and streamer DJ Akademiks addressed the speculation. "Janice is not Joe, and I’m gonna be honest with you, I hate to break it to people… I don’t actually think Janice is Jay-Z," he said, adding that he believes the "Janice" who is the focus of the song is a woman Drizzy was involved with. "Drake always fucking with some new bitch… The shots are very direct."
"You boys got big off my name, that’s big enough/We know how you OGs rockin' already, my n***a, the jig is up," Drake raps in the first verse of the song, which Akademiks suggested is a reference to Jay-Z because his nickname is Jigga. "He's talking to either a few people… Maybe he goes for Kendrick," Akademiks continued, noting that he believes that Budden would agree it’s not about him. "I think people are stuck on the name Janice."
As it turns out, Budden, who heard the theories that the song could be about him, isn’t so sure if it is or isn’t.
"The internet has put one and four together and I’m Janice," the "Pump It Up" hitmaker said on the latest episode of The Joe Budden Podcast, before dissecting the track. After putting it to his co-hosts, who mostly agreed the song is about Budden, he said he wasn't so sure.
"The record is 'Shut the Fuck up Janice, and maybe I'm Janice, but he's dissing — at least when I listen to it — I thought he was dissing everybody else in the world. I didn't really hear a Joe Budden diss," he said. "I got to listen to it again now."
"The funny shit is I'm Janice even if I'm not Janice now," he continued. "I see some n***as out there mad I'm Janice. They trying to talk me out of it. 'It ain't you. It ain't Joe.' Ay, it is if it ain't."
Pushing play on the track, Budden said he wanted to "get to the bottom of" the mystery, explaining how he just woke up one day to people calling him Janice.
"This shit hard," he said of the track as it played. "I'm that n***a, yo. I ain't gon' hold you, I'm that n***a." As the track continued, however, Joe decided that he doesn't think it's about him. "I ain't hearing it," he said. "Nah, I don't hear it."
Budden did, however, compare the potential diss to the time Migos hit out at him on the 2017 song "Ice Tray."
"Well, since I'm Janice, this reminds me of when the fukin' Migos dissed me in that fuckin' No. 1 song, and everywhere I went for the whole summer they were playing it," he said.
During Akademiks' stream, he also broke down more lyrics from "Janice STFU," suggesting that most of the it features veiled shots at Kendrick Lamar, Pusha-T, and The Weeknd.
The track, which interpolates Lykke Li’s "I Follow Rivers," topped the Billboard 100 chart last week, with 41 other tracks of his landing on the chart.
The rest of Iceman features some very obvious disses directed at Kendrick Lamar, but it also features bars aimed at ASAP Rocky, DJ Khaled, Rick Ross, LeBron James, Jay-Z, Mustard, and J. Cole, among others.
