Rap fans looking forward to a new year cleansed of conflict and bad vibes after a fractious 2024 might not get their wish. Just a day into 2025, Joey Badass seems to staked his claim on the top spot in his hometown’s rap rankings for himself — a position that’s sure to be disputed by somebody in the argumentative Big Apple — with his new song “The Ruler’s Back.” But one line, taken from a classic Jay-Z hit, has some fans thinking that the rift between the East and West Coasts of hip-hop has been reopened by Joey’s chest-beating new track.
Tapping Conductor Williams and Mario Luciano to produce a soulful beat, Joey raps, “Too much West Coast dick lickin’ / I’m hearing n****s throwin’ rocks, really ain’t shit stickin’ / ‘Cause if we’re talking bar for bar, really it’s slim pickings / I rap like I draw pentagrams and kill chickens.”
The line nods to Jay-Z’s 1996 track, “22 Twos,” which appeared on his debut album, Reasonable Doubt, at the height of the friction between Suge Knight’s Death Row Records, led by Tupac Shakur, and Sean “Diddy” Combs (then known as Puff Daddy) and his imprint, Bad Boy Records, which was fronted by The Notorious B.I.G.
While Joey doesn’t name any names here, the West Coast bar is a clear nose thumbing to the past year of fanfare celebrating Kendrick Lamar and his spanking of Drake in their spring battle. It looks like he wants some of that attention back on the birthplace of hip-hop — and himself, naturally. We’ll see if anyone steps up and accepts the smoke, but something tells me we’ll be looking at a much less contentious calendar year.