‘The Bomb’: The diss track 50 Cent released to take shots at Diddy
50 Cent has known Diddy for a long time and had something against the Bad Boy rapper way before he was hit with sex trafficking and racketeering charges. The pair met through Jennifer Lopez after she recommended him as a writer during the early days of his career.
However, 50 was quickly put off by Diddy after he was asked to go shopping with him. “I thought that was the weirdest shit in the world because that might be something that a man says to a woman,” he once said. “And I’m just like, ‘Naw, I’m not fucking with this weird energy or weird shit,’ coming off the way he was just moving. From that, I wasn’t comfortable around him.”
In 2006, 50 decided to diss Diddy on ‘The Bomb’ (also known as ‘Hip Hop’), which appeared on the G-Unit Radio 22 Hip Hop Is Dead Verse Two mixtape. The song saw him rapping over Hedrush’s iconic instrumental for Dead Prez’s 1999 track ‘Hip-Hop’.
On the record, 50 questions who shot and killed Biggie Smalls in March 1997. In the first verse, he calls Diddy “soft” and claims he knows something about his death. He raps, “Who shot Biggie Smalls? We don’t get ’em, they gon’ kill us all/ Man, Puffy know who hit that n*gga, man, that n*gga soft/ He scared them boys from the Westside’ll break him off /Dump on his ass, so he run to Harlem shake ’em off.”
Later in the track, he references Diddy’s famous White Parties and claims that he would no longer be invited to his events after dropping the song. But 50 wasn’t bothered about any of that. “Oh, I guess this means I won’t be invited to the White Parties in the Hamptons/ I don’t give a fuck/ I don’t wanna hang out with you punk ass, no way,” he says.
50 distanced himself from the White Parties last year amid allegations building against Diddy. “I’ve been very vocal about not going to Puffy parties and doing shit like that,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “I’ve been staying out of that shit for years. It’s just an uncomfortable energy connected to it.”
Diddy allegedly used to call his house phone, but he refused to pick up, which confused his ex-partner. “I remember Diddy would call, and my son’s mum would answer, and I didn’t want to get on the phone like, ‘No, no, no,’” he recalled. “And she was like, ‘What the fuck? We need money.’ She’s looking at me, like, ‘What? Why don’t you want to talk to him?’”
He continued, “I didn’t ever party or hang out with him. Puff is a businessperson; when [people call him] a producer, I see people that were taken advantage of, who produced things that he took from them. He got the credit. He’s not a producer. He’s been able to take advantage of the business and the creatives in it. I don’t have any interest in doing that. I actually fall under the creative. So I just didn’t take to hanging out with that.”