Credit: Alamy

The language of hip-hop is so often infused with references to family. The bonds that people form from within the scene can so often be familial in nature, for both good and for ill. Families love each other, but they also fight.

Listen to the way that Young Thug spoke about his fellow rappers and collaborators Lil Baby, Lil Uzi Vert, Gunna and Lil Durk in 2021. “I’m ready to die by Lil Baby, Durk and Uzi, Gunna,” he told Zane Lowe, during an appearance on his Apple Music show. “I’m ready to die by Lil Baby, Durk and Uzi, Gunna. I’m ready to die by these people. You know what I’m saying? If it ever comes down to it, this shit ain’t got nothing to do with no music… I always turn them to family. We don’t look at them like rappers. We all look at each other like brothers and sisters. Bro, we really argue every day, bro.”

What Thugger is describing here is a family-like connection with his friends and collaborators, but it’s not literal. Yet there are, in fact, plenty of rappers who are genuinely related to other rappers. Hip-hop can be a tight scene.

Rae Sremmurd duo Slim Jxmmi and Swae Lee are brothers, as are the Clipse duo Pusha T and Malice. But fans of those two groups would already know that. What’s interesting is how many rappers out there are related without it really being common knowledge. There are plenty of surprising examples.

10. Pete Rock and Heavy D

Heavy D, and his group Heavy D & the Boyz, started making waves towards the end of the ’80s, releasing their debut album Living Large… in 1987 and quickly finding commercial success with it. It’s now considered to be a classic of early hip-hop. Watching on in the background, as Heavy D worked to build up his career in the music industry, was his little cousin Peter O. Phillips—better known today as the legendary hip-hop producer, and occasional rapper, Pete Rock.

Around the time that Heavy D was getting signed, Rock had started hanging out with his future musical partner, CL Smooth. They looked on as Heavy D became a popular artist, and, eventually, they started experimenting with their own music. By 1991 they had released their debut EP, All Souled Out, and they, like Heavy D, grew to become hip-hop legends in their own right.

9. Q-Tip and Consequence

Consequence owes his emergence in the rap game to A Tribe Called Quest, whose fourth album, Beats, Rhymes, and Life, he featured on—and whose leader, Q-Tip, is his cousin. His association with the group helped him to launch a rap career of his own, but, unfortunately, things between him and Tip weren’t always especially rosy. They actively ended up beefing after Q-Tip joined Kanye West’s GOOD Music label following Consequence’s break with Ye.

“I didn’t get any records for Cons TV,” Consequence told VladTV, speaking of the abandoned album that was meant to be released on GOOD Music, “and maybe not even a year later, ironically, Q-Tip was a GOOD Music artist and saying that there was going to be a Cruel Winter [an unreleased sequel to GOOD Music’s compilation album, Cruel Summer], which never came out. That was the shadiest shit ever. It was!” The cousins eventually made up.

8. 21 Savage and Young Nudy

Back in 2015, as 21 Savage was beginning to make a name for himself within the Atlanta hip-hop scene, the up-and-comer decided to bring a relative along with him: Young Nudy. Savage convinced his cousin Nudy to rap on a track he was working on called ‘Air It Out’—and, sure enough, it took off. Before long Nudy had become a young rapper of note, too, just like his cousin. The pair would collaborate several more times in the years that followed.

Nudy’s ties to Savage have clearly boosted his profile, but he insists his success is all his own. “After I did ‘Air it Out’ with Savage people just started fucking with me,” he told Billboard in 2018. “But I built my own little lane in all this shit, you feel me? Most rappers like they’ll be up under a rapper instead of handling their business. They’re just sitting there patiently waiting, waiting for another motherfucker to do something for them. That’s not me, I got all my shit on my own. My cousin, just on the music side, I don’t ask him for anything. I just straight went out there and did my motherfucking thing. That’s all you got to do. If you want it, you got to do it. I had my few little fuck-ups and shit but I got it right.”

7. Tierra Whack and Will Smith

For her fourth album, Lately I Feel Everything, released in 2021, Willow Smith enlisted the services of rapper Tierra Whack, who appeared on the track ‘Xtra.’ It wasn’t clear to the public at the time, but this was a familial act—the pair, it turns out, are cousins. That revelation only emerged years after the song had been released, while Whack was chatting with The Source in 2024. Asked to reflect on her memories of spending time with Willow, Whack slipped the unexpected truth into the conversation.

“Me and Willow were just eating at a restaurant and just like cracking up, like laughing at everything,” the rapper said. “People were watching and just being crazy. She’s so cool. That’s my cousin, so yeah.” That “cousin” reference was uttered fairly nonchalantly, but the interviewer picked up on it, asking whether or not she meant Willow was actually a “blood” relation. “Yeah,” Whack replied. “Yeah, Will is my uncle.”

6. Ice Cube and Del the Funky Homosapien

It can’t hurt for wannabe musicians to have family members working in the music business as they’re setting out for themselves. Del the Funky Homosapien certainly benefited from it, beginning his career by writing lyrics for his cousin’s rap group, Da Lench Mob. His cousin was Ice Cube, who is about as solid a hip-hop contact as anyone could reasonably ask for. Cube helped Del to release his first album, I Wish My Brother George Was Here, but beyond that their collaborations dried up. As Del revealed to Sound of Boston in 2016, they don’t really keep in touch very much, though there doesn’t seem to be any bad blood between them.

“Haven’t really spoke to him since my brother’s funeral,” Del explained, “but when we talk it’s about regular shit I guess… we both are rap fans, music fans, fans of lyrics, so usually I just be on the latest, seeing where he at with it. I was always kinda more hip far as underground shit. He older so he usually gaming me up, you know… seeing if my head screwed on solid. Right now I would probably want him to check out how my lyrics sound, see if he dig it… I try to be less abstract, more aware of being humorous, so I would wanna see if he was entertained by it all, hahahaha… he usually is but he think I’m a loon too.”

5. Snoop Dogg and Nate Dogg

Cousins Snoop Dogg and Nate Dogg worked together so many times before the latter’s untimely death in 2011. Theirs was a defining sound of the West Coast, their frequent collaborations producing multiple hits over the years. Their early work together included music that they produced as members of the group 213, which also counted Warren G as a member, but their musical connection had already been established long before even that. Nate himself once reflected on his early musical partnership with Snoop in a conversation with a journalist from Clash, with his remarks later being published after his death.

“I went to school with Snoop,” Nate explained. “We were friends before that but at high school we hooked up. We used to be in the PE area in the back of the school, rapping. We were sixteen years old at the time. I could rap, but not as good as Snoop could, so I’d sing and make hooks for what he was rapping about. Snoop and Warren G were best friends so we three started hanging out together. We’d go to the VIP record store together, rap, sing and make our own tapes. We called our group the 213 after the area code for Long Beach. Even though they’ve now changed the area code, we’re still in the 213.”

4. Cardi B and GloRilla

When ‘Tomorrow 2’ came out in 2022, not many people realised that its two stars, GloRilla and Cardi B, were actually cousins. But a couple of years after its release, Cardi confirmed the truth on Big Boy’s Neighborhood. “That’s my cousin,” she said of GloRilla. “A lot of people don’t know this. My grandfather, he used to—I don’t like to put my family business out there—push weight or whatever. He lived in Tennessee. He didn’t really told my grandma that he was dealing with somebody over there. He had a kid out there, and that’s GloRilla’s dad. So that’s what make us related.”

It turns out that, initially, neither Cardi nor GloRilla had been aware of their connection, but, after they started noticing similarities between them, they became suspicious. “I asked her, ‘You just feel like we’re too much alike? You get my jokes and everything,’” Cardi reflected. “She’s just like, ‘Yeah. There’s something funny. Something really weird.’ So we just [started asking].”

3. Kendrick Lamar and Baby Keem

Baby Keem’s big break came when he appeared on the Black Panther soundtrack, which was curated by Kendrick Lamar—who happens to be his big cousin. He then built on this success, and on his professional links to Kendrick, with the release of ‘Family Ties,’ the fourth single from his debut album The Melodic Blue. The single, which featured Kendrick, charted, and its cover art featured a photo of the two rappers and their shared family.

Keem’s connection with Kendrick has been tight throughout his still-young career, and it’s not just about work. “It goes beyond music with me and him,” Keem once told Apple Music. “So, whenever I need anything regarding, like life, and if I need some wisdom, then that’s who I go to. That’s one of the first people I look towards, him and [Kendrick’s manager and creative partner] Dave Free. It’s been huge for me just as a young man.”

2. RZA, GZA and Ol’ Dirty Bastard

Wu-Tang Clan is very much a family affair, as the author of a book about the group, SH Fernando, laid out in an interview with Spin in 2022. “Well, the core of the group was always RZA and his two cousins, GZA and ODB,” Fernando explained. “GZA’s mom and RZA’s mom are related—I believe cousins—and RZA’s grandmother, Mae, is ODB’s father’s sister, so ODB and RZA’s mom were actually first cousins. Then you have Popa Wu, who is ODB’s older cousin on his mother’s side.”

Even Fernando, an expert on the group, finds it difficult to keep track of the band’s links beyond that. “After that, it gets kind of complicated,” he admitted, “since all of these guys have huge extended families, and cousins are considered more like brothers and sisters. RZA himself has 10 siblings and his older brother Divine ran Wu-Tang Management from the beginning.”

1. Dr Dre and Warren G

Dr Dre and Warren G are actually really closely related—albeit not by blood. Dre’s mother married Warren’s dad, making the two hip-hop legends step-brothers. But, sadly, it seems that this familial connection hasn’t proven enough to keep their relationship sweet. In fact, Warren recently revealed on the Ugly Monkey podcast that he no longer maintains contact with either Dre or Snoop. “It’s no diss to neither one of them or anything like that,” he said, “but it’s like, y’all could call Warren to come do a cameo or come hang out or something. I don’t want no money or nothing from nobody, just call me to be around.”

Warren revealed that he and his son, who, at the time, played in the NFL, was snubbed by Snoop and Dre when they performed during the Super Bowl in 2022. “I was trying to get downstairs, to get down in the back, ’cause I had my son with me and he was home from the NFL,” Warren claimed. “So I was like, ‘I’m going to take my son down there so he could see Dre and see Snoop and everybody.’ Cause he hadn’t seen him since he was in the NFL. So I couldn’t even get backstage. I called everybody I knew. Nobody would answer their phones. I couldn’t get backstage, none of that. I didn’t give a fuck about performing, I just wanted to take my son down there to see all my folks and see everybody.”