The one who strikes first doesn’t always walk away with the W. That’s a lesson the rap world has learned through years of rappers’ clapback songs crushing the diss tracks from the enemies they’re responding to.
Sometimes, the rap clapback plays out exactly as you thought it would. When Nas unloaded his Hov-dissing track “Stillmatic Freestyle” after Jay-Z called him out at Hot 97’s 2001 Summer Jam, he had to know Hov had more heat coming his way. By the time Jay-Z’s The Blueprint album dropped that September, the rapper had delivered a ferocious blow everyone should’ve expected. That blow was “Takeover,” which, despite what a lot of fans had to
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