Easy Mo Bee has recalled a time when 2Pac was rude to him at the height of the East Coast-West Coast beef that grew increasingly violent throughout the 1990s.
The veteran producer sat down for an interview with The Art of Dialogue and spoke about the incident, which happened before a party on Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles.
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“We got caught at a light, and this black BMW — or was it a Mercedes? But it was a black drop top,” Easy Mo Bee recalled. “Pulled up next to my manager’s Cherokee Jeep Truck. So I’m sitting in the backseat, and A.B. is sitting in the backseat too. I think J.R. might have been in the front. I hear ‘Yo!’ I look over, it was ‘Pac!”
He continued: “I looked over, I rolled the window down. I say, ‘Yo, what up man? It’s Mo Bee.’ He looks up…he [ignores me]. The light turned, it changed and he drove off, and that’s when I said, ‘You know what? He don’t wanna deal with people from New York no more.'”
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While Easy Mo Bee produced a handful of 2Pac songs back in the ’90s, including “Temptations” and “If I Die 2Nite” from Me Against the World, the Brooklyn-raised beatmaker is best known for his collaborations with The Notorious B.I.G. and Diddy’s Bad Boy Records, whom ‘Pac was feuding heavily with at the time.
“You gotta understand this, he was in a position where he didn’t know who to trust man,” Mo Bee continued. “He didn’t know who to trust and you know what? I wasn’t mad. I understood that. I did, I understood it. If I had stuff like that happen to me, and I had somebody back from that city and I see them.
“I don’t know what he know, I just don’t know, so I don’t trust ’em. So it was a shocker, it shocked me, but I wasn’t mad about it. But it kinda hurt me, though, ’cause he looked up. He looked right at me. I said it’s Mo Bee and he didn’t even say nothing.”
The vicious East Coast-West Coast rivalry consumed Hip Hop from 1994 to 1997, and led to multiple fatalities and violent acts being committed in what eventually became a turf war. Fat Joe reflected on that dangerous time in an interview with the Checc’n-In Podcast in 2021, and credited himself with stopping the violence.
“You know what stopped the East Coast-West Coast Beef? Fat Joe,” Joey Crack claimed.
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Joe then told a story about how Minister Louis Farrakhan had arranged for representatives from both coasts to meet at his Chicago home, and that he and Doug E. Fresh were the only two East Coast MCs to show up to Farrakhan’s residence, which he claimed was full of West Coast rappers.
Upon arrival, Joe said he started having a confrontation with Ice Cube, who was beloved in New York and had previously performed at the Apollo Theater.
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“You shoulda been the n-gga tryna bring the peace,” Fat Joe said. “That’s what I was trying to tell him…everybody love you, you coulda set this shit up and squashed this.”
Joe then recalled Mack 10 stepping in to cool things down and the dialogue with the Inglewood artist turned into peace talks.
“Mack 10 was Ice Cube’s guy at the time, so me and Mack 10 hit it off and he was like, ‘Yo man, I fuck with you Fat Joe, everything I hear about you, this and that,” Joe recalled.
“And I’m like ‘Yo, you know I fuck with all of y’all too?’ So he was like, ‘Yo man, let’s show them that an East Coast and West Coast could do something positive, let’s work together. And we shot the movie Thicker Than Water out in L.A.”
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In other 2Pac news, multiple never-before-seen photographs of ‘Pac performing at Prince’s Glam Slam West nightclub in 1992 are currently being auctioned off by MakersPlace.
Dubbed “2Pacalypse92,” the collection includes 17 shots of the late rap legend, each one captured by Lawrence “Loupy D” Dotson, the former managing editor at Kronick Magazine.
