Kobe Bryant accomplished a lot during his brief time on Earth, and while his rap career didn’t take off in a major way, that doesn’t mean he was no good. Still, there aren’t many officially released Kobe songs. Now, though, Joe Budden has pulled back the curtain some on Kobe’s hip-hop stylings by previewing an unreleased song that Shaquille O’Neal sent to him.
On an episode of The Joe Budden Podcast, Budden played about ten seconds of the song, stopping after Bryant dropped the lyric, “Slash paragraphs to emphasize my emphasis.” Budden reacted, “Come on, man. […] They don’t do it like Mamba.”
He then explained how he got his hands on the song, saying, “Shaq sent this to my phone. I thought this was just like, a joint that had come out but I had never heard it.”
There are apparently more unreleased Kobe tracks in the vault as well: Rev Run says the NBA legend recorded a track with Run-DMC, saying, “He was excited to meet us, and we were excited to meet him. It was just beautiful hanging with Kobe — and starting to record a record that we never finished… maybe it’s in the archives of some studio, or a demo that we made in our house that we was going to give to them to download their vocals. But somebody will find it.”
Watch the video above, and read our look at Kobe’s rap career here.
