The one rapper Kanye West apologised to for dissing: “I reap what I sow”
On the track ‘Devil In a New Dress’, which featured on his My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy album, Kanye West slipped in a diss against a rapper he later claimed was one of his favourites, targeting Ma$e, something he eventually came to regret.
At one point in the track, Ye seems to address a lover directly, imploring her not to leave while she’s “hot”, which could perhaps mean angry or popular here, depending on how you look at it, but this is where he mentions his rap contemporary Ma$e in a way that’s not exactly complimentary.
“Why you standing there with your face screwed up?” Kanye raps to his lover, “Don’t leave while you’re hot, that’s how Ma$e screwed up / Throwin’ shit around, the whole place screwed up / Maybe I should call Ma$e, so he could pray for us”.
Ye is referencing the fact that Ma$e, right at the point when he was achieving his greatest successes in the music industry in 1999, decided to give it up. He announced that he was quitting rap to instead focus on becoming a pastor, dedicating himself to his religion.
As so often happens when artists announce their retirement, Ma$e did invariably return five years later. He had successfully become a minister during his break, though, and that was reflected in his new style of music. He was, as he put it himself on his album’s title track ‘Welcome Back’, a “bad boy gone clean”.
Even though Ye’s faith has clearly been very important to him for a long time, it seemed like, on ‘Devil In a New Dress’, he was making fun of Ma$e for quitting music to focus on his religion. The subject was naturally very annoyed about this, and, via Instagram, publicly demanded an apology from Ye in 2020.
Ye relented, though, tweeting, “Ma$e is right about that line”, referring to the diss Ma$e wanted him to apologise for, “I always felt funny about that line”.
Ye called Ma$e one of his favourite rappers, admitting that he “based a lot of [his] flows off of him”. He went on to note, “I’m the king of ‘ooh can I get away with this bars’ so I reap what I sow when the next generation does the same to me”.
The apology doesn’t seem to have softened Ma$e’s view on Kanye. In the years since it was made, he has continued to publicly criticise Ye’s behaviour, like when he claimed on his It Is What It Is podcast that Ye acts “crazier” when he’s in the company of white people.