Snoop Dogg knows a thing or two about diss records, and the West Coast legend agrees that Ice Cube has the greatest diss song of all time — and apparently it’s not even close.
Cube’s recent appearance on the Earn Your Leisure podcast saw him proclaim “No Vaseline,” his 1991 diss song aimed at his former group N.W.A, “the top battle song ever.”
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It came after he was asked to name his Top 5 diss tracks. Following “No Vaseline,” he rounded out his list with tracks by 2Pac, Nas, Boogie Down Productions and Kool Moe Dee.
“I mean, I would go with, you know, ‘Hit ‘Em Up’ is a good one,” he said on the podcast on Tuesday (May 23). “‘Ether’ is dope. I would go with ‘The Bridge Is Over,’ and I don’t know, I think I gotta go with ‘Let’s Go.’”
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Snoop Dogg took to Instagram on Thursday (May 25) to leave a comment on a post by AllHipHop in support of “No Vaseline” being the greatest diss track in Hip Hop history.
“Hands down, he does. Nothing comes close,” Tha Doggfather wrote, while DJ Tony Neal, the founder of the Core DJs collective, also agreed with the assessment. “Nothing close except for ‘Hit ‘Em Up,'” he said.
Ice Cube previously claimed his diss song aimed at N.W.A. “knocked ’em down like bowling pins.”
“I think [Dr.] Dre had just finished The Chronic and he was about to put out Doggystyle with Snoop [Dogg],” he told The Breakfast Club in 2014. “We had a chance to really talk. And we never really talked about the song, you know? We still haven’t talked about the song. I mean, damn, they was disrespectful, too.”
He continued: “If you really think about AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, I never even mention N.W.A on that record at all. It was all about what I was doing with [Public Enemy] and the Bomb Squad and Chuck D and them. So, for them to diss me on they EP, 100 Miles and Runnin’, I kinda threw a little jab with ‘Jackin for Beats’ at the end.
“And then they came with another couple of little disses. I said, ‘Okay, man, I’m tired of this. I’ma end this real quick. We gon’ set it all the way off.’ So that’s when I wrote ‘No Vaseline,’ recorded it. I put it on that ‘Cinderfella’ track, that Dana Dane track… we flipped it and it became a smash.”
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He concluded: “And I didn’t know that at the time they was already fragmented, breaking up anyway. So, that just — I guess knocked ‘em down like bowling pins.”
Released in October 1991, “No Vaseline” appeared on Ice Cube’s second solo album Death Certificate. Dr. Dre left N.W.A shortly after its release, leading to the dissolution of the group.
