While Kanye West does damage control on his tattered public image and half the music world tries to hash out their complicated emotions regarding his hurtful transformation into a MAGA hat-wearing Trump stumper, some of his earliest collaborators aren’t mincing words about their feelings toward him. While Talib Kweli wondered if Kanye just snapped under the pressure of competing with Drake while living in close proximity to him, Harlem rapper Cam’ron is aiming straight for the heart.
On the new Diplomats project, Diplomatic Ties, which released on Thanksgiving and featured a reunited core group of Cam, Juelz Santana, and Jim Jones, Cam takes direct shots at his beleaguered ex-colleague. On the album’s intro, “Stay Down,” he not only attacks Kanye’s bipolar diagnosis — which Kanye touted upon the release of his album Ye, then later recanted during a long-winded rant at the White House lunch he had with Donald Trump — but also calls his former friend an “Uncle Tom,” referencing the derogatory epithet coined by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
“Dame Dash my man, he shootin’ then I’m buckin’ with him/ They shootin’ at us? Sh*t, I’m duckin’ with him,” Cam boasts. “But I had to be firm and tell ’em that Kanye only f*ck with you when no one else is f*ckin’ with him/ He told me he was bipolar/ I looked and said, ‘Bipolar?’/ Don’t be ridiculous, he wasn’t in the mix with us… The ones in the Taurus, n—-, he a tourist / Uncle Tom n—- know nothin’ ’bout this chorus.”
It’s a very harsh take from the rapper who previous collaborated with Kanye on songs like “Down And Out” and “Gone,” and who defended Kanye just last year on his mixtape The Program. However, it looks like Cam’ron is fed up and no longer pulling his punches when it comes to sharing his opinion on the outspoken Kanye. It’s probably just as well Kanye declared he was distancing himself from politics recently, because he doesn’t have too many more friends to lose.
