“Now the Fat Boys breakup and everyday I wake up somebody got a problem with Hov.” – Jay-Z

The Jay-Z hate, it’s everywhere the Jay-Z love isn’t these days. Seems like most of his beefs stem from semi-personal relationships (longtime ones made in the music industry) and deep hood bonds that were formed in his old hustling days. So…that’s pretty much everybody he knows! We are talking the original Roc-A-Fella Records crew that includes Dame, Biggs, Cam’Ron & Dipset, Beanie & State Property, basically everybody except the dude in his will (Memphis Bleek) and the dude that wills him to greatness (Kanye West) to names like Jaz-O, DeHaven and Calvin Klein. We won’t even go into the whole Gucci Mane diss, Baby of Cash Money slight, Game’s constant love/hate tug-of-war rhymes and the random rap hater that’s trying to get Jay to respond. As the old saying goes, “heavy is the head that wears the crown.”

Yet, Jay seems to handle it all with style and smile. But something has to give at some point. It’s cool to be the guy that dragged Nas into the middle of Hip-Hop blvd and try to shoot ‘em up only to find out he had on a Teflon outfit. Nas ended up showing how to properly attack Jay-Z with “Ether” and gave hope to those that felt they could take him down. Let’s look at it for real though, that was Nas answering. Nas. The author of Illmatic. Not some swagged out, autotune creation that thinks they are more talented than they really are. Mr. Jones battled with science and perfectly placed reality bites that took chunks out of Jigga’s armor and Jay responded with “Super Ugly”. Say what you will about a Jay-Z loss, but that’s still a scathing round of uppercuts and power punches that most would never recover from. Just the sheer surprise of Nas’ retaliation and the fact that Jay was shaken for seemingly the first time, is what kept the hate flowing and the “Ether” love going. But that was eons ago, a little of the bite is lost in it as Nas and Jay have squashed the beef and have even done major business together. However, there is a line in that “Ether” joint that sparked some thought. Aside from Nas saying that “Eminem murdered you on your own sh*t,” it was the line “compared to Beans you wack.”