Key Takeaways
- After years of subliminal shots, Jay-Z vs. Nas evolved into rap’s most iconic rivalry.
- Though centered on Jay-Z and Nas, the feud involved key figures like Memphis Bleek, Mobb Deep’s Prodigy, and Carmen Bryant.
- A pivotal moment came at Summer Jam 2001, which helped spark the legendary “Takeover” vs. “Ether” battle.
- The rivalry escalated into one of hip-hop’s fiercest lyrical wars before eventually ending in reconciliation. Their truce later led to joint performances, Def Jam business connections, and collaborations like “Black Republican.”
Did Jay-Z vs. Nas, rap's greatest beef, begin over a missed studio session?
There are conflicting accounts of what would have been a historic collaboration—Some say it was supposed to be "Bring It On," others say it was supposed to be "Can I Live”—but one thing is clear, Nas was supposed to be on Jay-Z's classic 1996 debut Reasonable Doubt.
Jay wanted it to happen. Nas agreed…and then he didn't show up to D&D Studios. And from there, rap's greatest beef began.
According to Dame Dash, Nas and AZ were supposed to be on “Bring it On.” And even though they committed, they kept on blowing off the sessions. Eventually they settled on Sauce Money and Jaz-O to balance out the song.
While Irv Gotti, who produced "Can I Live" and helped behind the scenes on the making of Reasonable Doubt, remembers it slightly differently, but agrees that Nas never showed.
"We was waiting for Nas to do the second verse…Nas was supposed to be on this bitch," he said during a 2022 episode of Drink Champs.
It's unclear whether this slight was intentional or not. (Nas once admitted to missing a session with The Notorious B.I.G. because he was too high.) But a couple of years later, the two would eventually battle it out during an intense stretch, trading radio darts, concert callouts, and iconic diss tracks that turned deeply personal. This was coming from two rappers largely considered one and two in their respective positions as the Best Rapper Alive.
But it didn't happen overnight. In fact, it simmered for years. Here is a complete history of Nas and Jay-Z's epic beef.
Jay-Z and Nas’ origins, before 1996
Before Nas no-showed on Jay, the two rappers had history.
They first crossed paths in the early ’90s, when the rapper/producer Large Professor, who gave Nas his introduction to rap via an appearance on "Live at the Barbeque" in 1991, was on tour with Jaz-O, Jay-Z's rap mentor.
During a tour date in Washington D.C., Large Professor and his entourage encountered a tense situation and had to retreat to their bus. According to Large P, a young Jay-Z was on the bus and pulled a gun out of a duffle bag.
Jay would reference the moment later on "Takeover," rapping "I showed you your first TEC on tour with Large Professor." Large Professor confirmed it in 2002, saying: "We were figuring we gonna have to knuckle down… Jay came out of nowhere, reaching in his gym bag [pulling out a gun] like, 'Don't even sweat these niggas. I got that.'"
At the time, both were on rap’s periphery, but Nas was already a blue chip prospect. In 1993, he was the most hyped rapper coming out of New York, with a bootleg of his debut Illmatic already being passed around the city. The album, released on April 19, 1994, presented Nas as a new type of MC: a hood poet speaking about his experiences with a level of distance but also a command of language that was unparalleled at the time.
On September 13, 1994, The Notorious B.I.G.'s Ready to Die dropped. Both albums favored a more measured, deliberate cadence than what was popular in New York City at the time. It was also different from what Jay-Z, who was still using a triple-time delivery, was known for. However, while Illmatic was a critical darling, it was a commercial disappointment, selling only 59,000 copies in its first week. Meanwhile, Ready to Die scanned gold within two months of its release, bolstered by the success of "Juicy" and "One More Chance." Still, the impact of Illmatic could be felt among rappers immediately. This includes Jay-Z, who started to slow down his flow.
The rapper, alongside his partners Dame Dash and Biggs Burke, were looking for a deal. They couldn't get one, so they did a distribution deal with Priority and used their own money (Jay was still in the streets), connections, and hustle to scrape together an album.
On June 26, 1996, Jay released Reasonable Doubt, which, despite having a minor urban hit with "Ain't No Nigga," debuted at No. 23 on the Billboard 200 charts with 43,000 sold.
While the Nas verse never materialized, fans did hear his voice on the album: a line from the Pete Rock-produced “The World Is Yours,” a stand-out from Illmatic, is sampled on “Dead Presidents II.” Ski, the song’s producer, discussed the sample in 2006, saying, “When I first found the sample and I threw the Nas thing in there, I liked the record a lot. But it wasn’t my favorite record. I really loved it after Jay got on it. That’s what made me a fan of ‘Dead Presidents.’ When Nas was hot at the time, Nas’ voice was crazy. And when Jay threw in the lyrics, the first verse, the way he came on was bananas.”
Reasonable Doubt hit stores a week before a real blockbuster album: It Was Written, Nas's much-anticipated sophomore effort. It seems like he learned from the commercial missteps of his past, leaning into a more radio-friendly single, the Whodini-sampling "If I Ruled the World," and embracing a new mob-influenced gangsta image.
It Was Written was released on July 2 and was the commercial smash Illmatic never was, selling 270,000 copies in its first week. The album, though, was a critical letdown. Q-Tip allegedly told Steve Stout, Nas’ manager at the time, that he was “killing his career.” "Warren Coolidge," a.k.a. Elliott Wilson, wrote a double review of both albums for Ego Trip, making it clear that Jay’s debut was the superior work. While the journalist and critic dream hampton wrote an essay comparing the two, despite It Was Written being much bigger.
It Was Written also featured a line that appeared to be Jay-Z inspired. On "The Message" Nas raps "20G bets I'm winnin' 'em, threats I'm sendin' 'em, Lex with TV sets—the minimum, ill sex, adrenaline." Jay saw it as a shot, admitting as much years later in an interview with GQ. Nas told Complex in 2011, however, that it wasn't a shot, but rather he was using Jay as an inspiration.
"I saw Jay-Z driving a Lexus with the TVs in them…it was just saying that's the minimum you gotta have,” Nas said. “It's not a shot at him but he inspired that line.”
And from there rap's quietest cold war was heating up.
Jigga goes jiggy on In My Lifetime, Vol. 1 in 1997
Jay-Z's sophomore album, In My Lifetime, Vol. 1, came out November 4, 1997, a year after 2Pac had been murdered in Las Vegas, and eight months after The Notorious B.I.G. had been shot and killed in Los Angeles.
The commercial landscape was dominated by Sean Combs, aka Puff Daddy, the founder of Bad Boy, who released his classic debut No Way Out on July 22, 1997—an album that introduced a more commercial sound to rap, featuring loops of '80s pop classics and videos with shiny, bright colored clothes.
On October 28, 1997, just a week before Jay dropped his album, rival Mase—who was signed under Bad Boy—released his debut Harlem World, which featured "Feel So Good," which peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100. The album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard charts, selling 273,000 copies in its first week.
Which is to say, commercialization was in the air. And on In My Lifetime, Jay would make a similar move as Nas: he expanded his production palette to include Bad Boy's monster production squad the Hitmen—which included figures like Deric "D-Dot" Angelettie, Nashiem Myrick, Stevie J, Chucky Thompson, Ron "Amen-Ra" Lawrence, and more—embracing the jiggy style Bad Boy was dominating with.
It mostly didn't work. In My Lifetime was somewhat a disappointment. It debuted at No. 3, selling over 138,000 copies in its first week of release, and not going platinum into 1999.
The album also features a Nas sample on "Rap Game / Crack Game," but there was an even clearer sign the Queensbridge rapper was on his mind. On "Where I'm From" he raps "I'm from where niggas pull your card, and argue all day about who's the best MCs, Biggie, Jay-Z or Nas?"—a line that carried extra weight given the death of Biggie.
How Memphis Bleek escalated the Nas and Jay-Z beef
By 1999, it was clear both rappers had superstardom on their minds, and Jay had taken the lead.
In the prior year, Jay finally figured out a formula with the success of Hard Knock Life, which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, selling over 350,000 copies in its first week.
That album was bolstered by the catchy, Broadway-sampling title track, which peaked at No. 15 on the Billboard Hot 100. Meanwhile, Nas was coming off teaming up with Dr. Dre and allies like Foxy Brown and Trackmasters to create the supergroup The Firm.
Where Hard Knock Life overachieved, the debut album from The Firm underachieved. Nas went back to the drawing board to work on his double album I Am…, which would function as a bridge between the local street tales of Illmatic and the lavish lifestyle of It Was Written.
But early that year, the album leaked online. Forced to retool, he added more mainstream songs to the mix. When I Am... dropped on April 6th, 1999, the tribute to 2Pac and Biggie "We Will Survive" was one of the highlights. The song also contained what many heard as a shot at Jay, who had crowned himself Biggie's successor on "City is Mine." In the track, Nas questions those claiming New York's throne.
Later that year, Jay’s protege Memphis Bleek was rolling out his debut album, Coming of Age, and two songs became central: "Memphis Bleek Is…", the lead single, and "What You Think of That,” which included line about “balling until” you fall, as well as sharp lines from Jay. At one point he raps:
“Round here frontin' like my shit don't sound like nuttin'
Like I ain't got the crown or suttin'
Like I ain't the nigga you base ya life on”
Months later, in November 1999, Nas rolled out Nastradamus, his fourth album, which featured what seemed like a direct response to Bleek on the title track—flipping the "ball 'til you fall" line back at him:
“You wanna ball 'til you fall? I can help you with that
You want beef? I could let a slug melt in your hat”
There were rumors that Nas dissed Bleek because he felt like "Memphis Bleek Is…” was ripping off “Nas is Like,” his beloved 1999 single. But, years later, Bleek said that Nas wasn’t even trying to diss him. He told DJ Vlad that he let a friend from his block—he grew up in Marcy Houses, in the same building Jay-Z grew up in—get into his head and convince him that Nas was dissing him on the song.
That wasn't the only song on Nastradamus where Nas seemed to take a jab. On "Come and Get Me," he raps: “Girls dig you / Imagine what she feel for me / You make hot songs, but she know you steal from me.”
What was the role Carmen Bryant played in the Jay-Z and Nas beef?
In the spring of 2000, Memphis Bleek took the most direct shot yet, rapping on "My Mind Is Right":
“Your lifestyle's written/So who you 'posed to be? Play your position”
Then Nas disposed of Bleek entirely later that year on the QB's Finest’s single “Da Bridge 2001”:
“Oh, you didn't—wanna know whose life was written?
The life I'm livin': the ice, the women
The kites that's sendin' to lifers biddin'
The streets to prison
I touch you, then buck you—heats be spittin'
La-ser, AR-15, doors come down
Jaws is broke, your whole crew is coffin bound
Your hoe, your man, lieutenant, your boss get found”
As this was happening, Bleek was prepping The Understanding, his sophomore album, which featured "Is That Your Chick, "a Timbaland-produced Jay-Z banger that originally appeared on the European version of Vol. 3...Life and Times of S. Carter.
The song, now resurfaced by Bleek as a single, is about being entangled with another man's woman, and this is where the story gets especially knotty.
The song is rumored to be about Carmen Bryant, Nas's baby mother. According to Bryant, who wrote a tell-all book It's No Secret, published in 2006, the song prompted Nas to ask if it was about her.
She told him that she and Jay had been having an affair for five years and that the song was, indeed, about her. She makes a number of claims in the book: that Jay was obsessed with Nas, calling his phone asking for a verse; and that she got pregnant by Jay but miscarried.
Carmen and her relationship with both men would eventually become central to the beef, making what was once a rap rivalry far more personal.
Did Summer Jam 2001 launch rap's greatest beef?
In the summer of 2001, it seemed like the whole East Coast was at war.
Beanie Sigel and his State Property crew were going back and forth lyrically with Jadakiss and The Lox. Meanwhile, tension was also building between Mobb Deep—who also represented Queensbridge—and Jay-Z.
In the October 2000 issue of The Source, Prodigy took a shot at Jay over his line from "Money, Cash, Hoes": "It's like New York's been soft ever since Snoop came through and crushed the buildings."
In the interview, Prodigy talked about Mobb Deep and Queens rappers being the only ones to go after Tha Dogg Pound and Snoop Doggy Dog after they dropped "New York, New York." He said, Jay-Z was “a bitch-ass nigga for making that quote in his lyrics."
By January 2001, Jay took it to Hot 97. Hov, Memphis Bleek, and Beanie Sigel and his State Property crew went to the radio armed with subs and disses for days. During the freestyle session, Beanie Sigel started rapping over Mobb Deep’s "Quiet Storm" and threw what seemed like a diss toward the duo.
Also present was a rapper named H-Money Bags, whose name was similar to that of street tough-turned-rapper E-Money Bags—a man who had gone to school with Jay-Z. E-Money Bags, who was friends with Prodigy, called into the radio station and the two had a heated argument.
Which is all to say, shit was tense.
On June 28, Jay-Z headlined Summer Jam 2001, the annual concert put on by Hot 97, at the Nassau Coliseum. During the show, he went after Mobb Deep, premiering two vicious verses from what would become "Takeover" while projecting a photo of Prodigy, from when he was a preteen, in a dance class.
At the end of the verse, Jay dropped the line that would change everything: "Ask Nas—he don't want it with Hov."
Nas responded later that summer with the “Stillmatic Freestyle,” a brutal diss track aimed not only at Jay but his whole crew. Nas is surgical as he tries to expose Hov’s insecurities—how he once rapped in the rapid-fire style of cult New York City group Fu-Schnickens before eventually molding his flow after Nas himself.
This led Jay to add another 32 bars to the Kanye West-produced “Takeover” and make it the second track on The Blueprint, which dropped on September 11, 2001. Despite arriving on the day of the 9/11 attacks, the album debuted at No. 1 and sold 427,000 copies in its first week.
Takeover is one of the most vicious diss tracks ever recorded, building on the popular sentiment that Nas had traded his credibility for fame and industry access, and in the process forgot how to make great music. Jay raps
“You said you've been in this ten, I've been in it five, smarten up, Nas/Four albums in ten years, nigga? I could divide/That's one every, let's say two/two of them shits was doo/One was nah, the other was Illmatic/That's a one hot album every ten year average/And that's so (Lame)/Nigga, switch up your flow, your shit is garbage/What, you tryna kick knowledge? (Fuck outta here)”
Nas was down bad. Not only was “Takeover” hard but the diagnosis seemed correct: Nas peaked at illmatic and was now making albums like Nastradamus.
What did Nas mean by “Ether”?
While all of this is happening, Nas is preparing to release his fifth studio album, Stillmatic, a callback to his classic debut. The album was led by “Rule,” which saw Nas revisit the “If I Ruled the World” formula, though with far less success.
And then “Ether” dropped.
Premiered by DJ Kay Slay on Renegades Pt. 3.5 that December before being given to Funkmaster Flex who played it on Hot 97, the song was a methodical takedown of Jay—hitting everything from how he borrowed from Biggie to how his looks made him “hate women.”
“Ether” was brutal, but it could have been worse. According to Large Professor, there was a line about Aaliyah—who had been in a relationship with Dame Dash before her death—that Nas ultimately cut.
"Ether" was devastating. The public perception became that Nas was back. Years later, Dame Dash discussed the moment when Jay heard the song and how upsetting it was, saying: "He was the only person I ever seen really rattle [Jay-Z] like that. Yo, bro, I couldn't even talk to this dude. For three weeks, I didn't talk to Jay about any of that shit."
The song dropped on December 4, 2001, Jay's birthday. On December 11, Jay responded with "Super Ugly," a freestyle over Dr. Dre and Knoc-Turn’al’s "Bad Intentions." While "Takeover" had touched on Nas' catalogue and hinted at his relationship with Carmen, here Jay revealed he had an affair with her, all while rapping wildly disrespectful lines about leaving condoms in the baby’s seat.
The song premiered on Hot 97, where listeners voted on which diss track was better. Nas' diss won, which essentially confirmed he won the battle. Not helping was that, days later, Jay went back to the radio to apologize because his mother wasn't happy with what he said on “Super Ugly.”
"Mom put in a call and said, 'That went too far,'" Jay said. "She's never, ever called me about music. So I was like, OK, OK, OK. I'll go shut it down.'"
Meanwhile, Nas was still in gloat mode.
Stillmatic dropped on December 18 and was perceived as a classic out of the gate, with The Source giving it five mics (albeit a version of the magazine without the same credibility as it once had). Nas appeared on the radio to accept his victory lap while taking more shots at Jay. "Self praise is no praise, that's clapping for yourself. For you to say it's cool for BET to put you over Biggie, that's sick," he said. He also told a story about seeing Jay at a party before the beef really started,and they both agreed they couldn’t let the tension escalate.
And yet…Nas continued to go at Jay. Nas was announced as the Summer Jam headliner for 2002, where he planned to diss Jay again. This time he wanted to lynch a Jay-Z figure on stage. Hot 97 wouldn't let him do it, and he went on a warpath, switching his allegiance to Power 105 while dissing Angie Martinez and Funkmaster Flex in the process.
How did rap's greatest beef end?
Even though Nas was declared the victor, the two continued to trade shots. On The Blueprint²: The Gift & the Curse, which came out on November 12, 2002, the title track features Jay rapping:
“And y'all buy the shit, caught up in the hype/'Cause the nigga wear a kufi, it don't mean that he bright/'Cause you don't understand him, it don't mean that he nice/It just means you don't understand all the bullshit that he write/Is it Oochie Wally Wally or is it One Mic?/Is it Black Girl Lost or shorty owe you for ice?”
Nas had one more closing moment in him, this time on his sixth studio album God's Son with "Last Real Nigga Alive," which told the story of all the tension between Biggie and Wu-Tang and how it bled into his situation with Jay. The song ends with the line: “I was Scarface, Jay was Manolo / It hurt me when I had to kill him, and his whole squad for dolo.”
By 2005, with Jay-Z retired and focused on his executive role, tensions had cooled. That led the two to finally bury the hatchet. On October 27, 2005, Jay headlined a concert called I Declare War and, in a surprise move, Nas joined him onstage. Together, they performed “Dead Presidents II” and “The World Is Yours.” A photo from the night—Nas in a green military jacket and Jay in an Adidas track jacket—became one of the defining hip-hop images of the year.
By 2006, they became business partners.
After finishing his deal with Columbia Records, the label he had been signed to since 1992, Nas became a free agent. At the time, Jay-Z was serving as president of Def Jam and signed Nas to a deal reportedly worth $3 million per album for his first two releases, including recording budgets. On December 19, 2006, Nas released Hip Hop Is Dead, his eighth studio album, which featured “Black Republican,” the pair’s first official duet.
During an interview with MTV prior to the album’s release, Jay and Nas spoke about their beef, with both noting that despite how personal things got, it was always going to stay on wax.
“What we staged stopped the world for a second,” Nas said. “It was always respect. There was never a point where he wanted to gun me down or I wanted to gun him down. It was never that.”
Over the years, the two collaborated on a number of songs, including “Success” in 2007, which appeared on American Gangster, and “BBC” in 2013, featuring Justin Timberlake, Beyoncé, and Swizz Beatz, from Magna Carta... Holy Grail. The two are now in a better place. In April, GQ spoke with Jay-Z, who briefly addressed the feud, saying, “I actually regret that because I really like Nas... he’s a really nice guy.”
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