“I’m like a star in the sky, they wishin’ on me to finish / I knew the money would come to me ’cause my palms kept on itchin’ / I knew that bitches were rough on me when I pulled up on bitches / But it’s okay ’cause I know the game and I played my position”
Introduction:
Let’s talk about the history of the diss track.
In the mid-80s, a young upstart genre birthed in the streets of the Bronx named hip-hop was just beginning to crystallize into an organized, recognizable force. At this point, it was still a niche genre with limited crossover success, and it had yet to fully disentangle itself from its disco origins. But the flurry of development overtaking the genre was so sustained and consistent that music historians have since memorialized the period as hip-hop’s “Golden Age”. It was an exciting time for the genre, especially in its epicenter—New York City in the mid-80s—which was about to see yet another innovation canonized into hip-hop culture. It all started in 1984, when Brooklyn rap group U.T.F.O. released a song entitled “Roxanne, Roxanne”, a hard-hitting banger about a woman named Roxanne who spurns the advances of the group’s members. It’s since become a hip-hop classic, but its influence would touch beyond the song itself, because the song’s subject matter inspired a bunch of Queens rappers to fire back. One of these rappers, 14-year old Lolita Shante Gooden, decided to take on the mantle of the song’s titular Roxanne and release a response record from her point of view, resulting in a fiery, profanity-laced boom-bap hitter called “Roxanne’s Revenge”.
This song immediately cornered the entire Queens market, and its success was so all-encompassing that Shante herself decided to take on “Roxanne” Shante as her stage-name. It also set off the entire scene, with everyone else deciding to get into the “Roxanne Wars”, as they were calling it. An entire slew of response records was released in the song’s wake, with some even claiming that they were the “real” Roxanne, and others even releasing songs from the point-of-view of Roxanne’s family. This continued until it spawned an entire Roxanne mythos. A Roxanne Cinematic Universe, if you will. Those tracks are still up and available for everyone to hear today, but the point is that these en masse back-and-forth trading of barbs between rappers galvanized battle rap and birthed the modern diss track as a commercial force. Battle raps had existed before this, of course, but it was only after the Roxanne Wars when the commercial potential of the diss track became all-too-clear. Damn near everyone was talking about Roxanne Shante, The Real Roxanne, and the beef tearing up Queens. It proved that people would eat up this kind of public drama, and it caused a firestorm well before hip-hop’s mainstream explosion in the ‘90s. It definitely set the stage for bigger things to come.
And things definitely got uglier and more intense as the years went on. Hip-hop diss tracks were shaped by the battle rap culture of black communities in big cities like New York, wherein young rappers would trade barbs and face off against each other in order to test their skills and demonstrate their superiority over their would-be competitors, and this competitive mindset eventually bled over into the actual hip-hop industry the more mainstream it became. Rap beefs which had previously confined themselves to the underground were now spilling over into the mainstream, but the hood mentality and mindset which birthed this tradition remained steadfast. This meant that diss tracks got a whole lot more detailed, and a whole lot more vicious. Combined with the pressures of mainstream fame, the battle-rap mentality proved fatal, with the vitriol behind rap diss tracks ramping up to fatal levels. Of course, we’re all well aware of the consequences behind the gangsta rap era’s most venomous diss tracks.
And because of that, it feels like the diss track has become a mostly masculine affair. It’s a consequence of hip-hop’s general bent towards men, for sure; most of the big mainstream rap beefs of the ‘90s and the 2000s featured men, and while female rappers had had beefs during that time, of course, their general lack of visibility in the mainstream meant that their tracks received comparatively little exposure. Which, as with all things, really does a disservice to the crucial role women played in pioneering the diss track. “Roxanne’s Revenge” impacted the scene in a way I’d only see matched three decades later, when Kendrick Lamar’s scorched earth guest verse in 2013’s “Control” inspired all the rappers he’d taken shots at to respond. It was an absolutely monumental achievement for an artist as young as Roxanne Shante. And considering that she wound up being largely forgotten for decades, until people began rediscovering her legacy in the 2010s, she absolutely deserves her flowers.
And it feels like a particularly good time to pay tribute to her monumental achievements, considering that we are currently living through a particularly fertile time for women airing their dirty laundry in their music.
The songs:
As you’ve probably noticed by the relative lack of activity on this blog for the last 2 or so months, I had a monumentally difficult time filling out my Top 10 lists for 2023, mainly because my full-time job has drained so much of my free time, and also because 2023 had been such a barren period for pop music that I had to really dive deep to find 20 songs that even constituted hits, let alone hits worth writing about. And boy, did that delay come at an inopportune time, because while 2023 had basically zero hits, the first month and a half of 2024 has been absolutely stacked with big, hotly anticipated releases and actual musical buzz. There’s a lot of stuff that I definitely would’ve tickled had timing been on my side—already, I’m sitting here stewing in anxiety at my inability to discuss Usher’s Super Bowl performance, the hot mess that was Justin Timberlake’s “Selfish”, Beyonce’s surprise drop country album, the Lil Nas X single that flopped. The only reason I made this a “versus” episode was because there was no way in hell I was missing both of these songs.
But even disregarding that, there’s still enough similarities between both of these songs to merit the comparison. For one thing, they’re technically both comeback singles by two artists who’d otherwise receded from the limelight the past two years. It’s been a good long while since the last time Ariana released any new music of her own, with her starring turn in the upcoming Wicked live-action adaptation (which is looking to be a flaming hot mess of its own) taking up most of her time, and considering how much of this blog’s early momentum was built around Ariana’s releases, the amount of time that has passed since the last time I discussed her surprises me. As for Megan, after enjoying a spectacular 2020 and 2021 where she was basically the biggest and most legit rapper alive, her career took a backseat as she found herself increasingly embroiled in disputes with her label and the public fallout from the incident with Tory Lanez, as she had to battle for her good name against a hip-hop community that seemed to want to tear her down. So yeah, it’s been a pretty stressful time for her.
Has that time away done any good for either of these ladies? Well, we’ll see. At the very least, both of these songs are inextricable from the fact of these two ladies’ absence, and they’re both geared towards addressing all the haters who’d taken that absence as an opportunity to talk shit about them.
“Yes, And” is an early ‘90s house-inspired song that, not even 15 seconds into the song’s release, has already been compared to Madonna’s “Vogue”. The comparison is so obvious that Grande has given up avoiding it altogether, and she seems to have embraced it to the point of consciously invoking it in all the marketing material. It’s certainly got the pedigree to back it up, considering it has the fingerprints of pop veterans and frequent collaborators Max Martin and Ilya Salmanzadeh, the latter of whom basically launched Ariana into the mainstream by producing her first few big hits, including 2014’s “Problem”. If there’s a record for longest working pop superstar collaboration, it would definitely have to go to these two, so it’s no surprise that she tapped him for her big comeback.
Of course, the element of the song that’s caught people’s attention is not the music, but the lyrics, which confront the paparazzi and the shit-mongering gossip reporters buzzing around her personal life like flies. This is not the first time Ariana has propelled a song by invoking public drama surrounding her, of course, but it may be the first time she has an actual threat to her reputation that she must defend. She’s been consistently coy about what the song is about, but judging by the lyrics and the timing of its release, the song seems like a dead-ringer response to all the rumors surrounding the circumstances of her relationship to her current beau, Ethan Slater. To put a long story short, the timing of their shack-up is suspicious—both of them were married at the start of 2023, both of them divorced their respective spouses not long after meeting, and both of them got together not long after their respective divorces. Slater’s estranged ex-wife Lilly Jay even dragged Ariana Grande by saying that she was “not a girl’s girl”. Make of that what you will.
But that’s all fairly singular and straightforward compared to the issues Megan is addressing on “Hiss”, an absolute firespitter of a track designed to take out as many birds as she can with one stone. This is not actually Megan’s comeback single—she released the song “Cobra” late last year, to rapturous critical acclaim but surprisingly muted audience reception which I could only chalk up to the inherent limitations of indie label distribution. It certainly couldn’t have been because of the song’s quality, because it’s damn near one of her best. In any case, “Hiss” wound up vindicating “Cobra”’s relative lack of commercial success by rocketing right up to #1, although its more provocative subject matter may have contributed to that. The song is basically a sustained series of bullets against all the haters that had sprung up in the wake of the Tory Lanez shooting and her legal battles with her label; and make no mistake, she takes on damn near everybody that stepped to her with a cold, laser-precise efficiency. It was certainly laser-precise to piss off one particular rapper, who released her own diss track after basically melting down on social media because of “Hiss”.
So how did we get to this point?
The review:
There’s a correct and a wrong way to publicly air out your dirty laundry through your music.
Deciding whether or not to release a kiss-off song with heavy tabloid overtones is a carefully-calibrated process that involves numerous considerations for even the faintest hope of success. There’s a lot that goes into the process, and a song like this can be made or broken by factors like the artist’s talent and songwriting ability, their skill at communication and telling a story, the manner of presentation, the public goodwill towards them, etc. But there’s one quality which, I find, towers above all these other factors—and that’s the artist’s charisma. The airing of public drama has an inherent tendency to force the public to choose either one of two sides, and because of that, you damn well better be sure that that public sympathy will go to you, because otherwise, what’s even the point? Even when the song is expressing some abhorrent, morally reprehensible sentiments, the people’s goodwill towards you will go a long way in safeguarding your public profile and reputation.
And I’d argue that an artist whose ability to pull this off has wavered back and forth is Ariana Grande, who utilized this trick quite a lot during the late 2010s, one of the most tumultuous periods of her career. I’ve written about this phase of her career in previous articles, but to recap for those of you who might not be aware, in the late 2010s Ariana Grande was plunged into personal and professional turmoil, beginning with the Manchester Arena bombing that occurred during one of her concerts, in which she was jettisoned into the limelight as the reluctant spokesperson of an unfathomable tragedy despite wrestling with very understandable guilt over the incident. This compelled her to take a brief hiatus in late 2017-early 2018, but even after that, the tragedies did not stop. That year opened with her highly publicized breakup with Mac Miller, which became even more publicized when he died later that year, as well as her whirlwind romance and engagement with Pete Davidson, which spawned an entire fountain of obnoxious memes before they also broke up abruptly near the end of 2018. And that’s not even getting into the mountain of public scrutiny thrown her way for her supposedly cold-hearted decision to break up with Mac, people unfairly blaming her for his death by overdose, the fact that she got seemingly publicly groped by a minister during Aretha Franklin’s funeral, the relative underperformance of her then-current release Sweetener, just a whole slew of unfortunate events which really ratcheted up the publicly sympathy for her.
And you could see that public affection trickling into her music, even the stuff she released before things really started hitting critical mass. I made her 2018 single “Breathin’”, her crystalline ode to powering through overwhelming emotional stress, my #1 best hit song for that year simply because when she sang that song, she sang it with the authority of someone who knew what she was talking about. But the real culmination of that critical mass of public sympathy was undoubtedly the single she closed the year out with, the titanic pop smash “thank u next”, an absolutely monumental musical achievement that directly confronted the public drama in a manner unprecedented for most pop divas primarily because of how on-the-nose and explicit it was. Unlike most of her fellow pop girlies, she didn’t mask her subject matter with coy references, but instead opted to directly namedrop all of her exes and singing directly about the roles they played in her life. I admit, it was precisely that on-the-nose approach that hindered my appreciation of the song at first—when I initially reviewed it, in the winter of 2018, I was mostly lukewarm to it, failing to see the true genius of what she’d pulled off on that album. It wasn’t just that she’d managed to redirect all that negative energy into a positive message of healing and self-discovery, but that she managed to make it feel universal despite being from an undoubtedly singular point of view. Even if you hadn’t just emerged out of a string of successive high-profile relationships, there was definitely something to the song’s message of reclaiming your identity apart from the people you’ve dated.
It’s the presence of that emotional core that elevated “thank u next” from tabloid bait into a bona fide anthem. It’s also generally not a trick you can pull more than once, which is why the empowerment angle represented by “thank u next” didn’t quite last in the public sphere. Ariana emerged from 2018 as victorious (no pun intended) as ever, with the album of the same name going on to become one of her most critically acclaimed releases; but her 2019 would not be as inspiring. The single following “thank u next” was “7 Rings”, a similarly triumphant song whose approach is a lot less inclusive than “thank u next”’ was, let’s just say. The song was widely criticized both for its wanton appropriation of black culture and aesthetics, especially because its attempts at co-opting the rags-to-riches language of hip-hop only made Ariana seem like a spoiled rich white girl flexing her privilege. Even Ariana’s charisma couldn’t carry lines like “Whoever said money can’t solve your problems / Must not have had enough money to solve ‘em”, and to this day, it’s still baffling how she thought including such blatantly elitist lyrics was a good idea. I’ve always been of the opinion that it was an attempt to carry through the empowerment bent of her immediately preceding work, seeing as the song made quite a few references to overcoming personal turmoil; but whatever the case, it sure demonstrated that Ariana’s approach had serious limits. What made “thank u next” work was its universality, something entirely missing from, and incompatible with, “7 Rings” and its oppressively elitist atmosphere.
This is also the reason why “yes, and” falls flat for me as an empowerment anthem.
Look, okay, yeah, the term “empowerment anthem” may itself be a limiting category to place this song in. I don’t necessarily think Ariana released this song to empower young girls and women to clap back against their haters or something. Her nose is far too upturned at the world for this to hit the same kind of notes that “thank u next” did, so I don’t necessarily think she was trying to go for the same kind of angle. The way she plays it here is far more confrontational, right down to the music video, which opens with the most insufferable intro I have ever heard on a pop star project. “I don’t want happy; I want art”. *eyeroll* But I still feel like this song was still trying to go dow a similar path, given how much of it is focused on “you”, the listener. “Say that shit with your chest, and” is a call to arms, so at the very least, Ariana intended for some degree of relatability and universality in this song.
But I think it would’ve been better if she’d just made the song a diss track all the way, instead of hovering somewhere in the middle without ever really becoming anything, because it nullifies any potential impact it could have otherwise had. I’d argue that the song really starts to fall apart around the second verse, where it abruptly switches from the second person perspective to the first person—notice that subtle transition from the “you” and “we” to “I” and “my”. That may not seem like a big deal, but I’d argue that it’s a crucial mistake, because it makes it clear from whose POV this is intended to come from. And that’s not good when you’re trying to make this a universal anthem about standing up for yourself and not caring what the haters say, especially since the core premise of the song rests upon Ariana’s showbiz problems, which is not exactly a relatable topic for most people. The presence of that line “why do you care whose dick I ride?” makes the real thrust of the song all too clear, and removes it from the realm of relatability entirely. It sounds like something that only someone who’s been in the music business way too long, to the point that industry bullshit has become their entire frame of reference.
On the obvious counterpoint, this song also doesn’t, and fundamentally can’t work as a diss track because the artistic choices behind it do not serve the song well at all. For one thing, I think it was entirely a mistake for her to model the song after house music, and “Vogue” specifically, because house music as a genre has always been about forgetting the haters, letting loose and getting swept up in the magic of the dancefloor. It of course acknowledges the hardships of life—a genre pioneered by black gay people couldn’t have done otherwise—but the music fundamentally functions as an escape from those issues, a momentary source of relief and euphoria. It just falls flat with the overly confrontational and aggressive approach of “yes and?”, whereby Ariana is tackling a very real, specific and singular problem that only really applies to her. It doesn’t work with this very buoyant, uplifting and spirit-filling kind of music. Lyrically, it falls apart because she only ever approaches the subject matter in the most generic “you go girl” way possible. While the inspiration for the song is obvious, it doesn’t ever go in-depth enough for it to be a compelling response in any way; all you get are vague generalities about how you should mind your own business and not comment on other peoples’ bodies and sex lives. I mean, that’s a fine enough message I guess, but it doesn’t really work when the thing you’ve been accused of is being a fucking homewrecker.
I think it will serve us well to really peel back on the allegations and drama surrounding Ariana Grande and Ethan Slater, because your appreciation of this song will depend largely on how you view the whole situation. To be absolutely clear, there’s no definitive proof of infidelity on either Ariana or Ethan’s end. We don’t know for a fact that Ariana Grande and Ethan Slater were cheating on their respective spouses before they got together. The only evidence we really have to go off of is the suspicious timing of their union, and the fact that Lilly Jay posted some cryptic callouts about Ariana that seem tied to the incident, but weren’t explicit enough to really prove anything concrete, let alone anything definitively establishing infidelity of any sort. As far as we know, everything’s kosher; innocent until proven guilty and all of that. So if we assume the best case scenario, I get why Ariana would feel miffed that people are stirring up shit over nothing and throwing around some very serious, potentially career-damaging allegations. I wouldn’t blame her for addressing the incident head-on in her music, and I don’t necessarily think she owes it to us to release a full-length response, or even to refute every allegation by giving a detailed explanation of what actually went down.
But at the same time, I feel like the allegations aren’t entirely baseless either. Though the facts publicly available to us don’t definitively establish anything, the timing is incredibly suspicious, and there’s at least enough circumstantial evidence for us to conclude that something went down. It may not necessarily cancellable shit, but it’s still the kind of allegation that’s serious enough to deserve actual consideration, serious enough that it can’t simply be dismissed as the dithering chatter of gossip-mongering paparazzi. If there’s any real flaw to pin on “yes and?”, it’s the tone Ariana takes here. This kind of “dirt off your shoulder” posturing might work if the allegations had been the kind of nonsensical frivolity we were levying against Lady Gaga a decade ago, but a cheating scandal is no laughing matter, especially not when the allegedly wronged party had just started a family with her allegedly unfaithful spouse. Infidelity is something that hurts people in real-life, and it’s understandable that fans would be concerned that an artist they follow engaged in that kind of behavior. So for her to take this tone feels dismissive and outright careless, to say the least. There’s no way to engender any public sympathy out of that, no matter how many vaguely empowering lyrics you pepper your song with.
But even as unsalvageable as the song is in its current form, I feel like if Ariana had had to choose between either of these two approaches, it should probably have been the latter—to go all out and air that dirty laundry in as detailed a manner as possible, really milk that public drama for all it’s worth, y’know? Because otherwise, there’s really not all that much to the song musically. It’s two years too late to have taken advantage of the house revival of 2022, but even if it had, I don’t think it would have succeeded. People have described the song as being “inspired” by “Vogue”, and believe me, that word is doing a lot of heavy lifting; it’s inspired by “Vogue” in the same way that Led Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused” was inspired by Jake Holmes. It’s not a genre throwback or a reinvention of an established style; it’s just a straight carbon copy, with not much else to offer besides rote reproduction. But hell, even that may have been our best case scenario, because Max Martin and Ilya Salmanzadeh do add a bit of their own flair in the production, and I swear to God, those drum hits sound almost exactly like the ones from “I’m Too Sexy”. Not even joking. I don’t know if it could have saved the song exactly, but I feel like adding more specificity in the lyrics could have at least helped ground it in Ariana’s personal life and made it far more interesting than it turned out.
Because otherwise, there’s not really a lot of goodwill to propel this kind of song, and the fact that there’s no counter-narrative, that the song consists entirely of rebutting the appearance rather than the substance of the rumors, and the lack of definitive rebuttal of the allegations being thrown around, all give this song an air of flippant narcissism which means I can’t help but read it in the worst light possible.
You’d think this vague generality would be absent in our next song, but instead it takes a similar approach, only it actually pulls it off far better—
Megan has been so titanically huge for the past few years that it’s surprisingly easy to miss that this is a comeback for her, too. She hasn’t actually been gone that long; her album before this, Traumazine, was released in August of 2022 and I’d even gotten to review some of her music that year, but that album’s commercial impact was relatively muted in comparison to the absolutely huge records she’d dropped in 2020 and 2021, and the critics didn’t exactly warm up to Traumazine the way they had her previous albums. At first, I chalked it up to the mismatch between her usual confident, cocky, brash thug persona and the newer, more confessional approach she was experimenting with on that album, and the tension between the awkward melding of those two approaches led to some oddly uncomfortable listening experiences. “Plan B”, for example, was an otherwise great track with a solid ‘90s East Coast hip-hop sample which is bogged down because of its tonal inconsistency; you couldn’t tell whether Megan was angry, boastful, or on the verge of tears, and because it just felt like some weird amalgamation of the three, you didn’t really know how you as the listener were supposed to digest it.
But looking back, there was another reason for the album’s relative underperformance, and that was a lack of promotion from her label. Now, many artists and stans will often use lack of promotion as a convenient excuse to justify a flop record—because it couldn’t possibly be that the music’s bad—but in this case, it’s pretty legit because that lack of promotion occurred as a direct result of her longstanding disputes with her label, 1501 Certified Entertainment. The details are pretty well known by this point, but if you want a brief rundown, Megan retroactively realized that her deal with 1501 was exploitative and “iffy” and embarked on a two-year campaign to petition the label to release her from her contract, up to and including releasing EPs and records against their will. She was tied up in lawsuits for years, and even her attempts to demonstrate good faith compliance with the contract by fulfilling her album quota floundered when the label refused to recognize Something For Thee Hotties as an actual album because of its length. It was ugly, and the situation only really abated in 2023 when the two parties settled and the label agreed to release Megan from the contract. Of course, it would naturally have been difficult for Megan to focus on her music while all of this was going on, so her ability to put out records was stunted for quite some time.
So in a lot of ways, it’s a real vindication of her staying power that as a free agent and independent artist (for the most part), she could rocket all the way to the top of the charts with “Hiss”, which is a diss track against everyone who made her life a living hell in the past two or three years. And I’m not kidding when I say that she takes on damn near everyone who stepped to her. Her targets range from Tory Lanez (of course), Drake, her ex-boyfriend Pardison Fontaine whom she essentially accuses of cheating on her in the song, not to mention the rampant misogyny in both hip-hop and the music industry, especially the way everyone tried to bring her down in favor of a dinky nobody with only the barest semblance of a rap career. But of course, the most high-profile diss on the song only occupied two lyrical slots, and yet those two measly lyrical slots wound up being the most pivotal parts of the track—
These hoes don’t be mad at Megan, these hoes mad at Megan’s Law
That line, “Megan’s Law”, is a reference to the real-life case of Megan Kanka, a 7-year old girl who was raped and killed by a known sex offender, thus necessitating a major legal amendment and leading to the creation of the Sex Offenders’ Registry. That story is relevant for our purposes because this is the line that set off Nicki Minaj, who has been criticized for years for marrying a registered sex offender, Kenneth Petty. Now, we don’t actually have concrete evidence that Megan had intended this diss for Nicki—she’s never actually named any of the people she was supposedly going after—but regardless, Nicki sure seems to think this line was aimed at her, given that she basically had a nuclear meltdown on social media, tweeting and posting incendiary Instagram stories explicitly targeting Megan and clapping back at her. You could practically hear her angrily typing away at her keyboard with tears flowing down her face; that’s how palpable her behavior was.
So it was no surprise when Nicki dropped her own diss track, “Big Foot”, which was universally panned, reviled even, for what fans and critics perceived as new lyrical lows even for her. The song was filled to the brim with weak disses and below-the-belt bars slut-shaming Megan and insulting her dead mother. Let me give you just a sample of what we had to deal with—
Yo, why the fuck they poke the monster?
Fuckin’ with Nicki this year, ho, I’m comin’ like a pornstar
She just mad that no nigga ever loved her
No nigga gon’ stand ten toes behind her
Is it my fault I got good vagin-er?
Why the fuck is you humpin’ on a minor?
‘Cause she was lyin’ on your dead mama (Ooh), on-on your dead mama (Ah-ah-ah-ah)
Lyin’ on your dead mama, on-on your dead mama
Lyin’ on your dead mama, lyin’ on your dead mama
Lyin’ on your, lyin’, lyin’, lyin’ on your dead mama (Brr, ooh)
Yeah, this is… this is not great. Most of the attention garnered by these bars focused on how reprehensible they were, and while I don’t disagree, focusing on the morality of the lyrics largely misses the forest for the trees. Since when were rap beefs about being respectful and not taking cheap shots? So no, I don’t fault this song for grabbing onto the low-hanging fruit; it’s still wrong, but it’s pretty par for the course for most rap beefs. It’s pretty difficult to clutch pearls at a song like “Big Foot” when rap diss tracks that have resulted in people actually getting killed or revealing private intimate details about the target’s families and personal lives have gotten valorized as iconic all-timers. No, the reason “Big Foot” deserves the backlash is that these are some of the weakest, most first-draft bars I have ever seen in all of hip-hop. It’s pretty undeniable that Nicki recorded this in under five days given the timing, and it was a pretty big L on her part to basically spoil the lyrics of “Big Foot” by posting them on social media before incorporating them on the song proper, but even if she hadn’t made her tirade publicly known before the song’s release, you’d still be able to tell that it was a rush job because the song is absolutely incoherent. There’s no throughline, she’s barely on the beat throughout and I honestly think she may have been high while recording it, and—most damningly of all—I couldn’t follow along the lyrics without having to refer to Genius.com while listening to it, which is a big mistake for a rap diss where you’re naturally supposed to draw attention to the lyrics.
“Big Foot” is so self-defeating that, really, the best thing Megan could do right now is not to respond, whether verbally or musically. And sure enough, she hasn’t. She just let Nicki’s meltdown sit there in devastating silence, allowing the public to eviscerate the track for her, which is such a baller power move that it may go down in rap history as one of the most one-sided feuds of all time, and one of the biggest Ls for any rapper to take. The fact that Megan never named Nicki even once throughout the entire “beef”, and that it only took two measly lines which don’t even really take up the substantial majority of “Hiss” to set Nicki off only adds to the blow. By not dignifying Nicki’s tirade with a response, Megan came out the clear winner of the beef, which is only fair, considering that “Hiss” was such a victory lap in every other respect that it deserves to take home one more trophy for the gold.
But maybe there’s a better reason why Megan didn’t feel the need to respond to Nicki—and that’s that “hiss” isn’t really a diss track at all, at least not in the classic rap sense. Yes, it takes shots at multiple people and that’s not exactly unprecedented in hip-hop—thinking specifically of Jay-Z’s “Takeover” or Kendrick’s guest verse on “Control”—but because “Hiss” also avoids the labored specificity of most diss tracks, it actually gives the song an air of actually feeling like a real song. There’s enough shots in it that it barely qualifies as a diss track, but those are ultimately all subsumed into the song’s actual goal, which is to serve as Megan’s “I’m back, bitch!” single and herald her grand return after a considerable period of inactivity. This song was not supposed to start shit, it was supposed to end shit, burn it all to the ground and rise from the ashes. If there’s anything this song was calculated to ignite, it’s not another feud, but instead, the dawn of a new era for Megan. It’s all about her, it’s always been about her, and she’ll be damned if she lets someone else steal her spotlight for her again.
In fact, that’s kind of what makes it so disappointing that people have made this whole moment about a “Megan vs. Nicki feud”. I’m not immune to that; this article gets its momentum mainly because of that framing. But I think that fundamentally misses the point of what Megan is trying to do, because there’s no real feud here. Only one of these parties seems actually interested in beefing, and as with all things, in rap beefs it takes two to tango. To the extent that “Hiss” fits into the traditional rap diss framework, it’s to radically reinvent the notion of the modern rap feud and introduce a revolutionary new approach in how to handle these kinds of things. Megan did not have time to waste devoting energy to all her haters, and so she just decides to take them out all at once, subsume them into something bigger, to demonstrate that it’s not the real point of what she’s trying to do. She didn’t have to do anything to come out the winner; she can just let Nicki rant and rave in a sea of her own personal issues, repressed guilt and internalized misogyny, she can just let Drake stew in his own mediocrity indefinitely, sip her martini as Tory Lanez rots in prison. It’s the biggest W I’ve ever seen in a rap beef, bar none.
But the biggest reason why Megan’s approach works is that this industry loves to pit women against each other. They were practically begging for this to be a big rap beef that they could milk through extensive and exploitative coverage. Megan didn’t give them that, and it’s certainly not her fault if Nicki would cop to the bait and slur her way into abject humiliation. Megan’s got her own shit going on, and if anything else, “Hiss” is a promising sign of things to come moving forward.
The verdict:
5/10 for “yes, and”, 9.5/10 for “Hiss”.
I didn’t discuss this very much in the review proper, but ultimately, despite my focus on how these songs function within the context of the diss track framework, my appreciation of these songs came down to how well they functioned as real songs, which is not always a given for diss tracks. “Yes, and” ultimately fell flat for me because it was just not a very good song, and would likely never have registered on my radar if not for its subject matter. “Hiss”, for all that the diss has gotten the most attention, actually represents a staggering evolution for Megan as an artist. Her struggle had always been balancing out her badass persona with her increasingly palpable vulnerability creeping into her lyrics; but I think she manages to find a balance on both “Hiss” and the single that preceded it, “Cobra”. So despite the new challenges she faces as an independent artist, the fact that this song lit up the world like this proves she’s still got it in her.
In The Loop 