Vic Mensa is ready to put his old beef with Akademiks behind them with a sit-down conversation – and he’s down to do it on Ak’s platform if necessary.
The Chicago lyricist stopped by Shade 45’s Sway In The Morning on Monday (May 22), where he dropped a freestyle taking accountability for not only his beef with Ak but with Lil Yachty, Drake and the late XXXTentacion as well.
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“I fell victim to addictions in my mental state/ Stupid shit, like dissing Drake – that was a big mistake,” Vic rapped. “But when you raised in a cage, all you know is MMA/ I dissed Yachty, dissed Ak, dissed XXX/ It was disrespect, it made the fans dis-invest/ I lost M’s like a Dow Jones regression/ But every L taught me an invaluable lesson.”
Talking to Sway afterward, Vic revealed he’d gotten the chance to put things to rest with Drizzy and Yachty, but he just needed some time to sit down with Akademiks and hash it out.
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“I’ve actually spoken to all of ’em, man,” he said. “I saw Drake at Virgil’s funeral and had some words with him. Yeah, he was [receptive to it]. He was like, ‘Man, honestly, I didn’t even understand it.’ And when I recall and think back, it was like, I was just gassed up being young. You know, Kanye, JAY-Z – they bickering so I wanna jump in. It was unnecessary. I spoke to him.”
He continued: “When we was working on Kanye’s album, I spoke to Yachty. And it was all love. Yachty was like, ‘Man, it’s all love, bro. We grown men. That was forever ago.’
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“Akademiks is one person that I have not spoken to. But I’m at the space where I don’t got room in my spirit for no beef, no problems with nobody. I’m beyond that. So, I’ma sit down with Akademiks. I’ll go on his show and speak to him. Because me and Akademiks’ thing, it was really more ideological too.”
Check out Vic’s comments below:
Vic Mensa and Akademiks’ beef dates back to 2017 when the former appeared on the Complex show Everyday Struggle, then co-hosted by Ak and Joe Budden. During the interview, the pair got into a heated argument about Chicago rap and the drill movement.
“I wanted to slap you in your face honestly,” Vic said at one point in the interview. “I’m just seeing you here and this is a tame environment so I would keep it to my words, but I really felt as though people exactly like you sensationalized and made a following off of clowning situations that we go through in real life.”
He added: “I really think you a bitch because there’s a video that you put up about a person named Trey 57, making all these jokes like ‘Here’s another Chiraq savage, this guy’s stupid, he messed with the Grim Reaper.’ Like n-gga, this is not a video game. That’s a n-gga I grew up with I knew since I was five years old.”
Akademiks returned the energy with a diss track a few months later, rapping: “A million views, we up next/ Vic Mensa upset, always chilling on set, thots breaking they necks.” The track was just a preview at the time, but it’s unclear if it was ever released in full.
In an interview with Paper magazine earlier this year, Vic noted that his personal stake in the conversation is why things got so heated so quickly.
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“That was why I got into it with Akademiks, because a kid that I grew up with and went to karate with when we were five years old ended up being a street n-gga, gang banging, et cetera,” he said. “He was also a very talented rapper. When he got killed, there was music involved, there were big drill artists involved, and I heard about it on Akademiks’ parasitic platform. So that’s why I was upset.”
