On the latest episode of his C'mon Son! podcast, host Ed Lover pays homage to his friend and Hip-Hop pioneer, Run-DMC 's Jam Master Jay , after the NYPD finally solved the case of his tragic demise.
LISTEN NOW: C'mon Son! The Podcast | Ep. #302: Everybody Beefin!
Photo credit C'Mon Son! The Podcast Addressing the numerous celebrity beefs , our current political climate, and cancel culture at large, Ed says, “We're not paying attention to the s*** that's right in front of us because we're so self-centered and self-absorbed now in this world that we really don't even care about other f***ing people. We don't care at all.”
“I put something out there the other day because... I took a nap and I woke up and I found out that two of the gentlemen -- well, I shouldn't even call them gentlemen -- but two of the men that were accused of Jam Master Jay 's death, who went to Brooklyn Federal Court, were found guilty of killing Jam Master Jay,” Lover explains. “It's about damn time, and I don't see nobody, nobody trying to cancel murder in our neighborhoods... It's another byline.”
Ed continues, “I'm quite sure somebody's gonna do a whole expose about it that I'll be able to read at a later date, but we're so busy arguing about gender and religion and everything else -- comedians going at comedians, all of that -- that it's OK for us to think about murder. Like it happened so long ago. We don't really care. ‘Somebody died. I wasn't even old enough when Jam Master Jay and Run-DMC was around. So, I don't care.’ We’re just lost in everything else instead of trying to stop these kind of things from happening.”
“There are thousands and thousands of mothers and fathers out there that are burying their children due to homicide,” he says, “and we're not saying, ‘Hey, let's stop homicide.’ The first thing we wanna do is fight, and threaten, and talk crazy to each other. Violence is the first thing that we always think about. We don't think about sitting down trying to come together as a nation and doing something to stop this amount of violence that's going on. All we think about is, ‘He said something wrong about the LGBTQ community, cancel him. He said something about religion, cancel him. Cancel, cancel, cancel... threaten, threaten, threaten... somebody should whip somebody's a**.' That's why [Tupac Shakur] is dead, [Notorious B.I.G.] is dead, Jay is dead, Nipsey [Hussle] is dead, Pop Smoke is dead, and 1000 others that I could continue to name because what we're concerned about is not love anymore. What we're concerned about is miniscule bulls*** that doesn't affect your everyday life. But we are less concerned about each other, because we love beef.”
“You know what saddens me the most about it?” Ed asks rhetorically. “Let me give you a little picture of where we grew up, when we grew up during the early days of Hip-Hop: Queens was a laughable borough. KRS-One once said, ‘Queens keeps on faking it...’ If it wasn't for The Bronx, this rap s*** probably would never be going on, right? The entire Queens was thrown under the f***ing bus. Run-DMC put the entire borough on the map, and especially Hollis... Everybody knew the swagger that Run-DMC had came from Jam Master Jay. We've talked about this before. Everyone knows this... Nobody in any borough could touch Run-DMC, and that swagger, the Godfather hat, everything came from Run-DMC -- and especially from Jam Master Jay.”
“It is a shame that two dudes from the Hollis crew killed Jam Master Jay. That s*** disgusts me to no end,” Ed says of Jam Master Jay’s death, clearly remembering the night he found out the terrible news. “I remember being at Madison Square Garden watching the Knicks game and hearing about it and rushing back over to Merrick Boulevard where Jay's studio was," he says, "standing out there crying with the homeboys and finding out that Jay had been killed. The s*** that saddens me is that it came from within, inside the Hollis crew... To kill somebody that's single-handedly put Hip-Hop on a higher level that has ever been along... to take that man away from his wife and his sons about a drug deal, and you still and get nothing out of it. That s*** saddens me, man. It saddens me that we kill our own. The people that we grew up with, the people that were closest to us, Jay was always there trying to help out, always there.”
Ending on a positive note, Ed says he's “glad that they solved it. Hopefully, sometime soon, somebody will go to trial for Tupac, and somebody will go to trial and get convicted for Biggie. Too much beef going on, man. Need more love. Keep God first. Everything else will fall into place.”
"It's 2024 and everybody got a problem with somebody!" Listen to the latest episode of the C'Mon Son! podcast above as Hip-Hop Hall of Fame inductee and Yo! MTV Raps legend Ed Lover takes on pop culture -- raw, rugged, and unfiltered -- giving listeners a break from the expected.
Plus, follow Ed Lover's Timeless Throwbacks and more on the free Audacy app
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