Why did De La Soul and Naughty by Nature have beef?
De La Soul, whether they liked it or not, had a reputation for being rap’s hippies. But that doesn’t mean that they were entirely strangers to conflict.
The trio, made up of the late Trugoy the Dove, Maseo and Posdnuos, did, at one stage, get caught up in a rap beef, like so many of their contemporaries. Their beef was with fellow hip-hop trio Naughty by Nature, whose members are Treach, Vin Rock and DJ Kay Gee.
Posdnuos spoke about the feud to Okayplayer in 2023, where he insisted that the whole thing was premised on a misunderstanding. It all apparently came down to a lyric that Posdnuos had used in the intro to the group’s fourth album Stakes Is High.
Pos raps, “So stick to your Naughty by Nature and your Kane / ’Cause graffiti that I based upon the wax is insane,” which, he claims, he meant in a positive sense. “I was just trying to say to someone like, ‘Yo, you stick to your way of how you get down… because what I have, it’ll get you beyond high. I’m just too potent.”
The reason he said “naughty by nature,” rather than just “naughty,” was apparently because he liked how it sounded. He didn’t mean anything bad by it. As he put it, “It sounded dope to say, kind of just playing on words.”
But Naughty by Nature took the line to be a diss. “Unfortunately,” Pos said, “after Stakes Is High came out, at some point, we realised that Naughty had a discrepancy, or maybe Treach, with that line. He thought that we were trying to diss.”
This was especially unfortunate, because the two groups had recently been performing at the same shows and had ostensibly developed positive ties. “We had just gained such a really cool relationship with each other, we just didn’t take it seriously like it was going to go into anything bad. We was like, ‘Yo, whenever we run into them, we can just talk about it.’”
As it turned out, De La’s relaxed attitude to the situation was a mistake—and things ultimately came to a head. During a performance one night, things got a little out of hand. De La Soul were on stage, interacting with the crowd, when suddenly people started to pull them off.
“I said, ‘Yo, what’s going on?’” Pos recalled. “I tried to pull my hand back and I see Treach coming up towards the same people, so it was his people.”
This incident, luckily, seems to have been as bad as it ever got between the two groups. “It was just unfortunate, it was truly a misunderstanding,” Pos insisted. “As it can be, which is good, time went by and cats forgot all about it and us and Naughty we got our shit straight. Me and Treach talked about it and everything and it was just an unfortunate misunderstanding.”