Nas is very aware that Jay-Z shared an image of him and all his Grammys on the same day he dropped the tracklist for Kings Disease III.
“Everyone who’s in Hip Hop is familiar with your beef with Jay-Z, what it was,” The Daily Show host Trevor Noah told Nas. “And I loved on here that you talk about that beef, what it was, how it disappeared, but how you’ll still text him saying ‘you know this isn’t over right?’”
“When I released the tracklist for the album the other day, he released a picture with all his Grammys,” Nas added. “Shout out to him.”
The song Noah was referring to was the album’s third track “Thun,” where Nas raps: “No beef or rivals, they playing ‘Ether’ on TIDAL, brothers can do anything when they decide to. In a Range Rover, dissecting bars from ‘Takeover.’ Sometimes I text Hova like, ‘N***a, this ain’t over.’”
Nas and Jay-Z have long reconciled since they traded shots on diss tracks like “Supa Ugly,” “Takeover,” “Ether” and “Last Real N***a Alive” in the early 2000s. The legendary duo squashed their beef on stage in 2005 during Jay-Z’s I Declare War Tour stop in New Jersey, and have since gone on to work together numerous times, including most recently on DJ Khaled’s “Sorry Not Sorry.”
However, Nas has always been open about the competitive spirit between him and his former rival, and in a recent FacTime call with Hov said their time together on “Sorry Not Sorry” inspired the Queens-bred legend to re-examine his bars.
“Alright, I’m just here tweaking lines and shit,” Nas said on the phone. “I’m in here, curating, rewriting four bars here and there … Oh, no no no. I gotta come back! Yo bro, this is one. The queen at the end, the harmonies, that gave me chills … this is definitely one for the books.”