Jim Jones has said it would take the “right partnership” in order for Dipset to reunite in the studio, but didn’t discount the idea of a reunion down the road.
The Harlem rapper sat down with Drink Champs, and spoke openly about the group’s turmoil over the years. When asked by N.O.R.E. if Jimmy, Cam’ron and Juelz Santana would ever crank out a new album, he said he believes the group could come together if they had a proper leader.
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“I ain’t gonna lie…if it was a perfect world and I could have things my way,” Jim said. “For me this is just how I see it…Partnering up with the right person whether it be a label or person who has an invested interest to see us win. And once we have a sound blueprint of that, and not to say it’s about the money, but money makes this shit move when it comes to doing music.”
He continued, “There’s a certain aesthetic that we wanna see and a type of sound the people wanna hear, and we ain’t trying to cheat the people with things like that and I think a lot of that has been going on in the past years of us doing this Diplomat installments because we’re so used to this whole independent layout. But I think that we put so much work in things like that that I think the people deserve a real Diplomat.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqu2h_FeKaw
The Diplomats were deeply tied to Roc-A-Fella in the early 2000s after the label signed Cam’ron and released his third studio album Come Home with Me. The success of the platinum-certified project, which debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200, kickstarted the group’s relationship with JAY-Z’s label, and they continued to play a huge role in the company thanks to their seminal debut album Diplomatic Immunity in 2003, which featured the hit single “Dipset Anthem.”
The double-disc record topped the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart while cracking the top 10 on the Billboard 200, but relations between the group started to sour soon after when Dame Dash reportedly offered Cam’ron the vice president position at Roc-A-Fella in 2002. JAY-Z was reportedly on vacation at the time and allegedly didn’t approve of the offer. What followed were numerous sneak disses and tension between the two sides, resulting in Dipset’s departure from Roc-A-Fella in 2005.
In a roundtable interview hosted by Roc Nation back in June, Jim Jones reflected on said sneak disses and credited 2Pac with helping them navigate rap beefs in a way that made them some money.
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“The beef inside of Hip Hop is not a mixtape thing,” he said to roundtable host and former Roc-A-Fella Records A&R Wayne “Wayno” Clark. “It’s a Hip Hop thing. It’s a lot of n-ggas that got a lot of ego, puttin’ them in the same room, and shit is bound to happen.”
He continued: “But the mixtapes heightened a lot of situations, because now, it could be totally unfiltered. At that time in Hip Hop, we was watching 2Pac and all of them, and watching how successful they was gettin’ goin’ crazy on everybody. It was a whole era right there where this was a marketing tool that was working for major labels and artists at the time that had the upper hand.”
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The Diplomats have since reunited multiple times both for live performances and on multiple projects, but the collective hasn’t put out an official release since 2018’s Diplomatic Ties, which, at the time, had been their first album in 14 years.
