50 Best Hip-Hop Diss Songs of All Time

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Target: Drake
Producer: No I.D.
Album: N/A
Best Line: “You are hiding a child”

Drake titled his long-awaited Pusha-T diss after a patois term for “ghost,” and poked at Push’s penchant for uber-privacy in a bar that invoked his fiancée’s name (and impending marriage) as a threat. To let “Adidon” tell, Pusha couldn’t be happier he was given an opportunity to fire back at Drake. His reply is 100 straight seconds of an unrelenting exhumation of just a few of the skeletons in Drake’s room. If Pusha’s implications are to be believed, Aubrey’s closet is like two stories, and the song simultaneously reveals:

– an extremely awkward blackface photo

– a secret lovechild

– a plan to unveil him in a corporate synergy sneaker rollout, 

– a baby mother who definitely does not fit the good girl standards of a Drake pop song

These are concentrated headshots, and that’s to say nothing of the intentional collateral spray Pusha coldly aims at 40’s health issues, as well as Drake’s parents’ failed marriage, his dad’s personal style, and his mother’s loneliness. Diss songs rarely end careers, especially when the target is one of the biggest A-listers in music. And yet, for as much as Drake throws his weight around and dismisses Pusha’s stature, the Virginia boy still sent Drake to the notes app to cop pleas—effectively dashing the Adidas deal and burdening Scorpion with songs that are more focused on subliminal responses than being good. It also turned J. Prince’s book tour into a PR spin and had Drake talking about it with LeBron James on Home Box Office.

The biggest misconception, though, is that the track wins off its gossip-mongering—not off the strength of actually being, you know, a good song. You can dock points for it being a glorified “Story of O.J.” freestyle, sure, but even that works as a shot when you factor in the blackface image and the original song’s context. The matter-of-fact delivery of “you are hiding a child” will go down in the history books. And the flow is tighter than ever, from “tick, tick, tick-six-six-six” to the malevolent way that “Love that baby, respect that girl/Forget she’s a pornstar, let her be your world” is the place Pusha chose to tag his trademark “yuugh.” Can you imagine what this man would have done over an original beat? I wouldn’t reply to someone who says, “If we all go to hell, it’ll be worth it,” either. —Frazier Tharpe

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