I was digging through some of my old mixtapes earlier today when I came across a Kanye freestyle over Jay-Z's Million and One Questions. I had heard the freestyle a few times before, but I had never really paid attention to the lyrics. It's mostly just the usual 'Ye trash talk, with a little bit of unbelievable gun talk thrown in for good measure ("bring guns to the arraignment/let one up out the chamber"). There was one part of the verse that caught my attention today, though:
For the millionth time asking me
Questions like Toni Braxton, harassing me
Like, 'You don't care about my son's feelings?'
Can I get a minute, you wack bitch? I ain't gotta jack shit
You heard "Takeover", who running this rap shit?
Uggh, fake tits, shut up and make hits
Can't we all just get along, spread love like "Take Six"?
Hold up, Kanye was beefing with Toni Braxton? I had to look up the details as I had no recollection of such a thing, and it turns out that, yup, things got a little heated between the two back in 2002. The dispute was rather convoluted, with Irv Gotti, Murder Inc, Jay-Z, Nas and even Tupac getting dragged into it. It all started with a song that Irv Gotti produced for Braxton, without the permission of Braxton's label Arista, that sampled Tupac's Me and My Girlfriend:
Before Braxton had a chance to clear the sample with her label, Irv leaked a version of the song to Hot 97 complete with a "dirty" bonus verse featuring Gotti himself. The execs at Arista had spent years carefully building up Braxton's squeaky clean image and were less than thrilled at the prospect of that image being tarnished by a duet featuring a half-assed mafioso-inspired verse from Irv Gotti. The P.R. department at Arista did their best to pull the song from the airwaves (unfortunately, eight years later Arista still won't allow the version with Gotti's verse to see the light of day, hence the neutered youtube clip above), planning to release a "clean" version at a later date with a proper promotional push behind the record.
Jay-Z, who had also been working on a remake of Pac's song over a beat produced by Kanye and who, through the six degrees of separation of his beef with Nas, had his own beef with Gotti, heard Braxton's song and rushed to put it out before her official version of the single was properly released. A week before Braxton's album came out, Jay released this:
Braxton, not surprisingly, didn't react well to Jay's new single and went onto Hot 97 to declare that, "Jay-Z and Beyonce are messing with my money. They're trying to steal my mojo." She then went on to say that Kanye, by flipping the same sample, had taken "money out of her child's college fund." Hence the line from Kanye's freestyle, which came two years after the initial dustup over Bonnie and Clyde.
Jay's version is far superior to Braxton's, though neither can touch the original:
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