MC Hammer’s Jay-Z Diss “Better Run Run” Makes Me Throw Up in My Mouth a Little Bit

(Shout out to me for the fantastic headline)


I was going to wait until the new Fails of the Week to write about this travesty, but Friday's just too far away. The day everyone was hoping would never arrive has finally come. MC Hammer has followed through on his promise to release a "diss" track against Jay-Z, and just as we all feared, it's embarrassing. You know how at your family reunion your 50-year-old uncle decides he can still ball with the young folks, and then proceeds to awkwardly throw up bricks, sweat heavily and eventually sprain his ankle? Yeah, that's what this is like.

For the record, this is technically a response track. Hammer took offense at Jay's, "Hammer went broke so you know I'm more focused / I lost 30 mil' so I spent another 30 / 'Cause unlike Hammer 30 million can't hurt me," line during "So Appalled". And by "offense", I mean Hammer saw an opportunity to try to get people to give a poop about him again. And it's one thing to take on Hova in a desperate bid for attention (cough Beanie Sigel cough), but it's another to do it so poorly.

"New rules, lemme show you the way / If a rapper talk tough, then he gotta back up what he say." - MC Hammer

"Um....I said I was fucking richer than you, and I am. So yeah. I backed up what I said." - Jay-Z

I know I'm just feeding into the hype by even giving this ridiculousness a moment of my attention, but I'm hoping that if Hip-Hop Nation can collectively shame Hammer hard enough, he'll just finally hang it up. And it's a shame too, because I think people would genuinely like to see him succeed again. If he got back into the studio and made some legit music, I'd absolutely listen. But this? This makes me want to throw up in my mouth a little bit. Maybe if he wasn't (apparently) being managed by five white guys in a tiny conference room in Denver things would start looking up for the Hammer man.