At the tail end of last year Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs revealed a very important snippet of a moment in hip-hop history. It was in 1995 that Death Row CEO Suge Knight took to the stage at the Source Awards and caused a stir when he threw a now-infamous diss that was always perceived as being aimed at Bad Boy Records honcho Diddy.
"Any artist out there wanna be [an] artist and wanna stay a star and don't have to worry about the executive producer being all in the videos, all on the records, dancing, come to Death Row," Knight said onstage to a sea of boos and scattered applause. There would be no contest in who Suge was referring to as Diddy would soon after take to the stage in his own acceptance speech and confirm that he was Knight’s intended target.
But last year in a conversation with host N.O.R.E. and DJ EFN of Drink Champs, Diddy stated that Suge Knight’s comments were actually directed toward the South and So So Def’s own Jermaine Dupri. “We had a conversation," Diddy said on the podcast. "The Tunnel was mine at the time. Let's not get it twisted. I was ordering garbage buckets full of champagne. The bar is where I would stand and walk around. My feet would not touch the floor. To make the long story short: this is where the after-party was, the world-famous Tunnel, so when I had ran up and asked [Suge], he said, 'Nah, I was talking about Jermaine Dupri.'"
Now almost a year later, JD has been given the opportunity to address Diddy’s claims, and according the music mogul, it couldn’t be further from the truth. While he doesn’t pad on to speculate who Suge was indeed talking about, Dupri maintains that he and Knight were on good terms at the time. “C'mon man," Dupri said with Bow Wow sitting next to him.
"Y'all know better than that. I'm the guy that's been on the forefront of everybody movement. Me and Snoop was like this,” he noted as he crossed his fingers. “That's how Bow Wow came [to So So Def]. Me having beef with Death Row? Never. Suge was in my office, coming to Atlanta, kicking it."
Catch the full conversation below.
