2024 is clearly hip-hop’s year of beef. Ice Spice and Latto, Nicki Minaj and Megan Thee Stallion, Drake and Kendrick Lamar — this year has so far been full of friction among some of rap’s top performers, and there are no signs as yet that rappers as a collective will find any fraction of chill anytime soon.
The latest acts to join the fracas are Cardi B and BIA, who spent the weekend trading shots in what appears to be the latest iteration of 2024’s Rap Beef-ocalypse. Here’s a timeline of their beef, so you can get caught up and explain to your friends, family, and co-workers just what the heck is going on.
July 2023: BIA Releases “Fallback”
Like most feuds in hip-hop, this one started off seemingly innocently enough. “Fallback” wouldn’t be considered a diss track by most — in fact, in the second verse, BIA specifically says, “I’m havin’ no beef, these bitches won’t say my name” — but in hindsight, it’s the song fans point to as the lit fuse for everything that came after.
March 2024: Cardi B Drops “Like What (Freestyle)”
Here’s where things begin to get spicy. Fans noticed that Cardi’s first single of 2024 interpolated Missy Elliott’s 1999 hit “She’s A Bitch” — the same song that BIA sampled on “Fallback.” Now, this wouldn’t normally be notable — lots of hip-hop songs sample the same classics (for instance, Bob James’ “Nautilus” is one of, if not the most-sampled song in hip-hop) — but for Twitter stans, this was tantamount to a declaration of war. Cardi’s combative rhymes on the track certainly helped the perception along for fans who look for hidden meaning in well-established hip-hop tropes.
However, where once upon a time, those conspiracy theories were confined to the insides of superfans’ heads, these days, those fans have direct access to the artists themselves. Alerted to the similarities between their songs, BIA subtweeted Cardi with a string of woozy face emojis. Cardi herself appeared to respond with a tweet of her own, writing, “Bitches make a fool of themselves every single time.”
May 2024: Cardi B Appears To Directly Diss BIA On GloRilla And Megan Thee Stallion’s “Wanna Be” Remix
Cardi seemingly delivered on her promise to “show ya something when I release this song” on the remix of her frequent collaborators GloRilla and Megan Thee Stallion’s new single “Wanna Be.”
“Guess I’m a teacher since you wanna sub me / She did what? Had no idea / Thought she was on the shelf, Ikea / Hope she talk like that when I see her / B*tch, please, don’t nobody wanna be ya,” Cardi rhymes in her verse, with the final two words strong resembling the pronunciation of BIA’s name. Meanwhile, her reference to being “on the shelf” seemingly takes a dig at BIA’s relative lack of chart success since her breakout 2020 single “Whole Lotta Money,” which was a viral hit on TikTok and climbed to the No. 16 on the Hot 100. Since then, only “London” with J. Cole has reached the Hot 100, peaking at No. 62.
June 2024: BIA Claps Back With “Sue Meee”
Absolutely no ambiguity here. BIA goes in on Cardi in her new track released on Sunday. In the song, BIA accuses Cardi of the usual shortcomings (seriously, can y’all find some new stuff to talk about? YAWN.), including the rumors that she and her husband Offset spent the duration of their marriage cheating on each other and that she uses ghostwriters. “Do I beef with you or do I beef with Pardi?” she taunts on the song-ending bridge. “You been scrapping projects since 2019.”
The song’s title, meanwhile, came from an Instagram Live stream in which Cardi threatened legal action against BIA for insinuating she’d ripped off “Fallback” for “Like What.” In the caption of an Instagram post teasing the track, though, BIA wrote, “Sue me? That’s not hip hop 😂.”
We’ll see if Cardi responds either way; she noted after her confrontation with Nicki Minaj in 2019 that beef is “bad for business.” But if it inspires her to finally get around to dropping that long-awaited follow-up to Invasion Of Privacy, I can’t say it’d be completely bad.
