Questlove voices how he really felt about Tupac Shakur’s infamous diss track, Hit ‘Em Up.
During a recent interview with the One Song podcast, Quest talked about iconic diss songs in hip-hop and what makes them stand out. When it came to Shakur’s 1996 song, he said, “I would respect 2Pac’s ‘Hit ‘Em Up’ if his music tracking was better. … ‘Hit ‘Em Up,’ to me, is disqualified, not because of the misogyny — forget all that. It’s like, ‘Dude, you’re rhyming over smooth jazz dinner music.’ Luther Vandross could sing over this!”
Tupac released the song as a dig to The Notorious B.I.G. and his crew. The Roots’ drummer continued to speak about the track. “People who are born in the later part of the decade that I was born in — alright, I was born in the ’70s — their relationship with 2Pac is different to my relationship [with 2Pac]. So thus, when this came out, everybody was like, ‘This is hard as s**t! Yo, he killin’ it!’ And I was like, ‘Dog, he’s smooth jazzed up Dennis Edwards.”
He added, “It doesn’t count. …My thing is, if you’re going to annihilate me on a diss record — if you’re going to kill me I want you to take me out like Cleo at the end of ‘Set It Off.’ That song, to me, is the weakest musical smack. I can’t get with ‘Hit ‘Em Up’ because the music, to me, is just…”
Questlove recently gave his take on the rap beef between Kendrick Lamar and Drake and said on his Instagram, “Nobody won the war. This wasn’t about skill. This was a wrestling match level mudslinging and takedown by any means necessary- women and children (& actual facts) be damned.”
He added, “Hip Hop is truly dead.”
Do you agree with Questlove?