Cam’ron and Ma$e have a major hit on their hands with their sports talk show It Is What It Is, but the pair had to mend a years-long beef before they got to that point.
Killa was the guest in an episode of Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson’s All the Smoke podcast, published on Thursday (December 21). Discussing his history with Murda – who he’s known since they were in elementary school – Cam admitted their issues were his fault and broke down how they got back to a good place.
“Ma$e gave me an opportunity to get my first record deal,” he began. “He did a video for me – my first video ‘357,’ which was dope. And then I had another single with him, ‘Horse & Carriage,’ and he didn’t do that video so my label started gassing me like, ‘Yo why your man ain’t doing the video? He want $50,000 to do the video.’
“So I started feeding into that shit. I’m like, ‘Word this n-gga acting funny charging me for the video?’ So we kind of fell out over that, got cool again. Then you know, he went to church. I kinda didn’t understand it at the time because that’s my man all day and I’m like, where church come from?”
He continued: “So I started bugging out on him because of that. So to be honest with you, the whole shit was my fault and just not understanding the kind of path he was on at the time. So I kinda was going at him on records and shit and he was ignoring me and shit, then one day he made ‘The Oracle’ and kinda flushed me one day. I was like, ‘That was pretty tough.’
“But you know when he made ‘The Oracle,’ I felt like Denzel in Training Day when the n-gga threw him on the ground with the shotgun. You’d be like, ‘Yeah, leave that n-gga alone! That’s that n-gga right there!’ Because I know the n-gga could really rhyme. We got cool again last year some time. I tried to put a tour together, tour didn’t go well and we just stayed cool after that.”
Last month, the Dipset leader also credited Million Dollaz Worth of Game hosts Gillie Da Kid and Wallo with helping get him and Ma$e back on good terms in 2022.
“Thank you guys also for helping connect me and Ma$e, and putting this shit together for us,” Cam said in an Instagram post. “To be honest with you, and we talked about this on Million Dollaz Worth of Game, we may not even still be speaking right now without you guys’ platform.”
He continued: “So we want to tell you guys thank you so much. And you see what it led to [It Is What It Is], because Harlem n-ggas are gonna start hustling once we cool again.”
Cam and Ma$e played high school basketball together in Harlem before forming the rap crew Children of the Corn alongside Big L, Herb McGruff and Bloodshed. But as he mentioned, the pair began growing apart in 1999 when Ma$e left New York to become a pastor in Atlanta.
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Ma$e returned to the rap game in 2004 with a new album called Welcome Back, which he promoted on Funk Flex’s Hot 97 radio show – where Cam and Jim Jones infamously called in to interrogate Ma$e over his abrupt departure from Harlem. The trio argued live on air, with Cam calling him a “fraud.”
Numerous diss tracks followed from Killa, the most noteworthy being “Take ‘Em to Church” off 2004’s Purple Haze, but Ma$e didn’t return fire until 2017 with the aforementioned “The Oracle.”
Tension between the two continued until August 2022, when Ma$e appeared on Million Dollaz Worth of Game. During the appearance, the rapper admitted to having regrets about the feud – which opened up space for the two to reconcile.
And the rest was history.
