The DMX song that secretly disses Kurupt
When DMX released ‘Party Up (Up in Here)’ in 2000, he must have been pleased with the result. It marked his best ever chart performance until that point in time, but, more than that, it also contained a secret dig against his hated rival. He’d managed to turn a diss song against Kurupt into a hit.
The song, which featured on X’s third album …And Then There Was X, was about its star man being driven to madness by unnamed enemies. “Y’all gon’ make me lose my mind,” he raps in the chorus. “Up in here, up in here.”
It wasn’t entirely obvious that Kurupt was a target of the song, but that fact was confirmed by someone in the know about such things. Xzibit, who featured on Kurupt’s 1999 song ‘Calling Out Names,’ spoke about it on the Effective Immediately radio show in 2025.
“What was crazy was when I found out that ‘Party Up’ was the answer to ‘Calling Out Names,’” Xzibit said.
‘Calling Out Names’ was a big diss track from Kurupt, and it didn’t just aim for DMX. Ja Rule, Irv Gotti and, crucially, Foxy Brown were all targeted in the song, too, in addition to X.
Foxy Brown is the key to the hostility between DMX and Kurupt, as she supposedly was in relationships with both men. Kurupt had once been engaged to Foxy, but things didn’t work out—and he accused her of having an affair with DMX. That, at least in part, is what ‘Calling Out Names’ was about.
“‘Party Up’ was a response to Kurupt,” Xzibit explained on Effective Immediately, launching into one of DMX’s lines on the track. “‘You wack, you twisted, your girl’s a ho / You broke, the kid ain’t yours and everybody know…’ They were fighting over Foxy Brown.”
Xzibit seemed to be fairly impressed with the manner in which these disses were deployed, and he thought that a particular contemporary artist should take note. Drake and Kendrick’s beef was still playing out loudly in public around the time of this interview, and Xzibit seemed to think that Drake could learn a thing or two from how DMX had handled things.
“That’s what Drake should’ve did,” he said. “He should’ve made a ‘Party Up.’ Nah, but he tried to get down and knuckle up with it. I keep telling n*ggas, don’t get into fights with n*ggas who like to fight.”