DMX wouldn’t mind jumping in the digital ring for an Instagram Live battle against Jay Z. The Yonkers native named dropped Hov as a potential opponent during an interview for Noreaga and DJ Efn’s Drink Champs podcast on Wednesday (May 6).
To be fair, Nore asked X to pick an adversary to which he casually replied, “Jay.”
While there’s a slim possibility that Jay and X will actually participate in Swizz Beatz and Timbalanad’s Verzuz series (Hov doesn’t have an Instagram account — that we know of), they have battled in the past.
Back in the 1990s, the then up-and-comers went bar for bar at a Bronx pool hall, and the match up morphed into a rap beef that spanned decades.
X went on to become the only rapper in history to have his first three albums debut at No. 1, not to mention a string of successful singles, but Jay wasn’t far behind with Hard Knock Life becoming his first album to debut atop the charts. Hov landed his first few No. 1 singles thanks to features on Mariah Carey’s “Heartbreaker,” Beyonce’s “Crazy in Love,” and Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” before scoring his first solo No. 1 with “Empire State of Mind.”
While both are among the most commercially successful rappers in history, they remained in an unspoken competition over the years. In 2010, X reignited the feud and dissed Jay at a concert in Arizona. A couple of years later, X clarified that the beef wasn’t personal.
“Like sports teams when you’re playing another team you’re not going to like them. That doesn’t mean that you want them dead, or you mean any physical harm to them, it wasn’t that type of thing,” X explain to MTV’s Rap Fix.“I understood and embraced what rap is/was. I didn’t like him because we battled, that’s all it was. I didn’t mean him any harm, I didn’t know him enough not to like him, but I didn’t want to be his friend.”
The rap rivals became “cordial” and eventually “earned each others friendship,” although X still didn’t consider Hov a friend at the time. In 2015, Irv Gotti explained that X and Jay were naturally competitive. “They always had friction because they battled and X, like, he hated him. Jay didn’t really give a f**k but they was always on some competitive s**t.”
Hov and Jay seemingly squashed the beef in 2016. The two posed for a photo together (with DJ Khaled in between them) at the New Jersey stop on Beyonce’s Formation World Tour.
It’s been a while since rap fans have seen them in the same arena but given the more than 3 million fans who tuned in to watch Babyface and Teddy Riley face off, a Verzuz battle with Jay Z and DMX would obliterate the internet.
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