The story behind Jeru The Damaja’s ‘One Day’
Brooklyn-born rapper Jeru The Damaja is one of hip-hop’s greats, albeit not one of its most well-known. His debut album, The Sun Rises In The East, is a classic, but its follow-up ended up getting him into trouble with none other than the Notorious B.I.G.
Wrath of the Math is Jeru’s second album, released in 1996. Both it and his first album were produced by DJ Premier, and they each focused on Afrocentric themes and the nature of hip-hop itself. It was his thoughts on hip-hop, in fact, that led him into a beef with Biggie.
Within the liner notes of Wrath of the Math, a message reads, “This album was created to save hip-hop and the minds of the people who listen to it.” Jeru was especially concerned with the commercialisation of the culture at the time, which, on the track ‘One Day,’ he deals with by mentioning two people he felt personified the trend.
‘One Day’ is a song about a hostage situation, but the victim is hip-hop itself. Jeru describes how hip-hop has been kidnapped by one powerful, highly commercial figure, who, by the end of the song, hands it over to another. The powerful figures? Diddy and Suge Knight, the heads of Bad Boy and Death Row Records respectively.
Jeru clearly saw Diddy and Suge’s interventions into the hip-hop scene as deleterious to the culture, as they produced commercialised rap music and stoked the flames of an East-West feud. Jeru clearly despaired over hip-hop’s embrace of commercialism, but, as for a specific beef with Diddy, he claims it was nothing too serious.
“There wasn’t really beef, nobody got hurt,” he told Clash in 2020. “Puff did some stuff I didn’t like; I made a record about it. That’s it. He didn’t like us too much, and that’s it. There was no real beef.”
While Jeru insisted that his problems with Diddy and Bad Boy never descended into a full-on feud, he did concede that words had been exchanged. “I seen dudes and his dudes seen me,” he said. “We exchanged a couple of words once or twice, but it was nothing like that. It wasn’t beef. Where I’m from, if people got beef, then people get hurt.”
As Jeru saw it now, nearly a quarter of a century later, the whole thing had been “childish,” not very serious. “It was just my ego,” he said of attitude at the time. “You asked about the brashness I had in my youth, the militant. I made a lot of bad decisions because I reacted to situations. I try to be pro-active now.”
But even though he viewed the situation, with the benefit of hindsight, as somewhat ridiculous in later life, one person at the time who was really annoyed about it was Biggie. He was signed to Bad Boy, of course, so he took Jeru’s song personally—and he responded with his own diss track ‘Kick in the Door.’
‘Kick in the Door,’ which was included on Biggie’s second album Life After Death, didn’t target Jeru alone. This was a diss song against numerous rappers, including Raekwon, Ghostface Killah and Nas. And the man who produced it? DJ Premier, who also made the beat of Jeru’s ‘One Day.’