What's playing in my deck

100 percent diss in honor of the wildly emotional response The Game to had to a fairly innocuous verse from Jay-Z.

I won't even bother pretending this is a comprehensive list of the best hip-hop diss tracks, nor will I attempt to place them in any sort of order of preference. I love all that hate equally.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go to work and put some water in Buck Nasty's mama's dish. Good morning (/Silky Johnson'd):

1. 2nd Round KO by Canibus. If the only real accomplishment of Canibus' short-lived rap career is taking an overly sensitive LL Cool J to task, then it was worth it. But actually, he remains one of the best mixtape MCs of my lifetime. He also gets bonus points for putting Mike Tyson on the track and in the video.

2. The Bitch in Yoo by Common. Some really unexpected heat against Ice Cube, who at the time was one of the giants of the game. Common was full of venom, starting off the song by calling Cube a "bitch nigga."

3. No Vaseline by Ice Cube. Pretty much, Ice Cube made it hard to take anyone from NWA seriously for quite awhile. Dre eventually recovered once he went solo but Eazy was never the same. What made the song so devastating is that, pretty much, Cube was right about all of it.

4. The Takeover by Jay-Z. Lots of people say he lost that beef with Nas. Nah, not to me. Some of that is because Kanye's track was so much better than what Nas was working with for "Ether."

5. The Bridge is Over by Boogie Down Productions. Not much to say about this one. This is pretty much the blueprint for diss tracks. A bonafide hip-hop classic. Biddy-bye-bye!



Honorable mentions: Ether by Nas, I already mentioned this above. It was helluva effort but I was never all that impressed with the track (it really hurts me to write that); Hit Em Up by Tupac, At this point, I was pretty much convinced that Tupac had lost his mind. I read somewhere once before that it sounded like a kid going through a temper tantrum. That sounds about right; 200 Bars and Runnin' by The Game; Dollarz and Sense by DJ Quik; F--k Wit Dre Day by Dr. Dre; and I'm an Animal by Jadakiss.