The Roots' Black Thought talks brief rap beef with Nas

theGRIO REPORT - The Roots, the legendary rap crew, have avoided beef with their fellow artists for the majority of their decades-long career...

Kyle Harvey

Apr 23, 2013

The Roots, the legendary rap crew, have avoided beef with their fellow artists for the majority of their decades-long career.

However in a recent interview, Black Thought, the emcee of the collective, reminisced about the time he had a feud with the rapper Nas.

Around the same time The Roots were given a role in Spike Lee’s controversial satire Bamboozled, Nas felt it was hypocritical for the hip-hop band, who’ve poked fun at rappers for selling out for corporate sponsorships, to appear in the New Line Cinema project. The Roots were cast as a band performing in blackface, named “The Alabama Porch Monkeys.”

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“In some interview he made a comment about how wack it was for us to do the movie Bamboozled with Spike Lee and ‘how you gonna call yourself The Roots and Black Thought or something and you’re portraying a group called The Alabama Porch Monkeys in Spike Lee’s movie with the ball and chain and all,'” Black Thought said on The Combat Jack Show. “Nas was spazzing out on a lot of people during that point in time because he was losing his mom. He had actual beef during that time and this was just a comment he made about The Roots.”

Check out what else the Philly rapper had to say about the brief beef here: The Combat Jack Show Ep 1.

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