Why Nas called himself the ‘bling king’: “Me and Diddy”
Around the time he released his 1999 track ‘Hate Me Now,’ Nas went all in on presenting himself as flashy. He started calling himself the “bling king,” and, to make sure the message was really driven home, he even brought Diddy on board for help.
During a conversation with Rolling Stone in 2007, Nas revealed that the beat for the song, which had been created by the producer D-Moet, was initially meant for Foxy Brown. She didn’t want it, though, so it eventually ended up with Nas.
“It fit with my album, I Am…,” Nas said of the beat, “so I did the track and it sounded perfect for Puff to be on, so I gave it to him, went to the studio, and he rocked it, knocked it out.”
Nas specifically wanted to invoke Diddy’s 1998 track ‘Victory,’ which featured the Notorious B.I.G. and Busta Rhymes. He called this his “favourite record,” and, as such, he wanted some of its energy on his own song. He wanted Diddy “to talk some of his shit on there.”
“I had him screaming a whole bunch of wild shit on here, and cats were slam-dancing to it in New York,” Nas explained. “It was really crazy, out of this world. At that point, I started wearing a huge chain, and I think me and Puff at that point started that bling shit and took it to the next level, and we did the video, and it was out of this world.”
Nas also reflected on the “bling” element of ‘Hate Me Now’ during a conversation with Pitchfork in 2006. As he made perfectly clear, he held no regrets about the direction he took on the track.
“I called myself the bling king,” he said. “My whole thing was to put on the bigger chain—to ice out the stuff. Puffy was to come out and outdo. We’d get with R Kelly on tour and he’d come out with more chains. That was happening on ’80s tours, but they didn’t call it bling and they weren’t wearing platinum or as many diamonds.”
Nas seemed to delight in the materialistic aesthetic that he and Diddy were promoting, with each man actively trying to outdo the other. “I loved that,” he concluded of the bling thing. “It was like, with ‘Hate Me Now,’ we had to give ’em something to hate us for.”
That comment seems telling. It appears that Nas, around this period at the end of the ’90s, actively sought to provoke a negative reaction from certain quarters with his pivot towards ostentatious showiness. He apparently wanted to be hated for his bling.