Bun B has spoken out about how it feels knowing Jay-Z borrowed a few lines from him for his Grammy-award-winning track “99 Problems.”
The Houston legend spoke about the experience while a guest on the People’s Party With Talib Kweli, and was asked whether he felt that a lot of Hov’s supporters were unaware that the first four lines of Hov’s third verse on the hit single were pulled from UGK’s 1996 song “Touched,” off their iconic project Ridin’ Dirty.
“I feel like enough people know,” Bun B told Kweli at the 32-minute mark of the video above. “But I don’t feel like it’s that big of a deal. I would call it mutual respect. We do this a lot in Hip Hop, right? Where we have artists who have said, ‘Fuck that was dope, the way he said that.’ And sometimes you wanna pay homage to that wordplay. How many songs, Kweli, have you listened to and been like, ‘I woulda rhymed that last part like this.’”
He continued, “And I think that’s what happens. I think you feel like, ‘This is a dope rhyme, I don’t think enough people heard this shit. I’m finna drop this shit in here.’ Sometimes you take a dope rhyme and make it a hook, and then people gotta go back and figure it out. But nah, I don’t think a lot of people know that. I don’t think it’s a big deal that they don’t know. Or a big deal if they do.”
This isn’t the first time Bun B has spoken about his well-documented relationship with Jay-Z. The former had previously talked about Jay’s “Big Pimpin,” in which he and the late Pimp C are featured, and told The Residency Podcast last week that the Vol. 3 cut was the first song to ever be handed a million-dollar budget for its music video.
“This was the first million-dollar budgeted rap video ever,” Bun said. “Now, rap videos had budgets that went over that [and] ended up costing a million dollars, but blocked one million dollars just for this music video.”
He continued: “I had never seen anything like it. It was the first rap video I think on ‘Making a Video’ on MTV. It accelerated so quickly, and then within I wanna say three months it was the number one record on the planet.”
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