Ja Rule admits that he'll probably never get to battle 50 Cent in the Verzuz arena
As a bit of isolation-based entertainment during this coronavirus pandemic, wildly successful producers Swizz Beatz and Timbaland have been organizing an Instagram Live series called Verzuz in which hip-hop artists, producers, and songwriters are paired up against each other to see who has the best and biggest hits—with previous episodes featuring competitions like DJ Premier vs. RZA and Lil Jon vs. T-Pain. Given the fact that people in general don’t have anything better to do these days and are free to hang out on Instagram and play their hit songs a lot of hip-hop artists have begun volunteering for battles that they think would be fun, or maybe battles that they mistakenly think they’ll survive, which brings us to Ja Rule and 50 Cent. The two have had a longstanding feud, at least in the sense that Ja Rule thinks they have a feud and 50 Cent seems like he wouldn’t really care if Ja Rule dropped dead.
Ja Rule has been angling for a spot on Verzuz for the past week or so, with him hoping to take on 50 Cent and settle which of them had the biggest and best hits once and for all (it’s 50 Cent, come on), but now, after 50 trolled him a bit on Twitter, Ja Rule has been forced to concede that the two of them will probably never meet on the Instagram battlefield. As reported by Complex, Ja Rule appeared on Hot 97 yesterday and acknowledged that, while he stands by his catalog of tracks and hates to “back down from a battle,” he knows that Verzuz is meant to be a celebration of the artists it pairs up and that he and 50 will never be able to have the “love and respect” that its competitors are supposed to share for each other’s work.
Basically, Ja Rule is playing a “be the bigger man” card here, saying that he doesn’t want to disrespect the hip-hop community with the negativity that an Instagram thing between him and 50 Cent would generate, while 50 Cent is just poking fun at him on Twitter. So maybe Ja Rule is the winner by default? He should lose some points for his involvement in the Fyre Festival, but we did all get some schadenfreude-y enjoyment out of that, so maybe it all evens out.