While Nicki Minaj and Megan Thee Stallion have been feuding for some time, their latest diss tracks aimed at one another indicate that the rappers and onetime collaborators won't be making up anytime soon.
No one knows for sure when the feud started or why, but many believe it stems from Megan collaborating with Cardi B on "WAP" in 2020, a year after Megan and Nicki released "Hot Girl Summer." Cardi and Nicki had been battling it out since 2017, even getting into a physical altercation at New York Fashion Week in 2018. Nicki's husband, Kenneth Petty, also got into the fray and was placed on house arrest in September 2023 after breaking his probation (which he received when he failed to register as a sex offender in California after moving there from New York) by posting a video in which he said he was out looking for Offset, Cardi's husband.
Petty has been an Achilles heel for Nicki since they married in 2019. Because he is a registered sex offender, convicted of attempted rape in 1995, he's provided Nicki's naysayers with plenty of ammo. But Nicki has been quick to defend her husband as well as his past crime, once responding to an Instagram user with: "he was 15, she was 16 ... in a relationship. But go awf, Internet."
So Megan knew how to really stick it to Nicki, and didn't hold back in "HISS," which she released on January 26. The track, which follows up where her single "Cobra" left off, fires off at all her haters, including Minaj and her convicted-rapist husband. Unlike Nicki, Megan is decidedly more clever in her dis, with the line, "These hoes don't be mad at Megan / These hoes mad at Megan's Law," which references the federal law that enforces publicly available information on sex offenders. Nicki’s brother, Jelani Maraj, is also a sex offender; in 2020, he was sentenced to 25 years to life for repeatedly raping his eleven-year-old stepdaughter.
The "HISS" release came after Nicki referenced Megan in her Pink Friday 2 track "Red Ruby Da Sleeze"; the lyrics include "700 on ’em horses when we fixin’ to leave / But I don’t fuck with horses since Christopher Reeve," alluding to Megan's "stallion" moniker, and later, "Dorito bitches mad that they not chose," referring to Megan's song "Flamin' Hottie" for a Doritos Super Bowl commercial. The most obvious verse directed at Megan: "That .40 cal a make ’em dance like a go-go,” as well as one in the popular track "FTCU," which states, "Stay in your Tory Lane, bitch, I'm not Iggy."
These verses reference Megan being shot in the foot by her ex-boyfriend, Tory Lanez, in July 2020 after a party at Kylie Jenner's house; despite receiving letters of support from fellow musicians such as Iggy Azalea, Lanez was sentenced to ten years in prison in August 2023.
After "HISS" dropped, Nicki came across as erratic as she took to Instagram Live and X to tease her response to Megan, even galvanizing fans to dox the grave of Megan's mother. Then, on January 29, she released her disjointed, strangely composed single "Big Foot," which sounds as though Nicki had been awake since "HISS" was released and recorded it off the cuff, sometimes slurring her words. While Megan's song was also directed at several other rappers, including Drake, Nicki's track is solely focused on Megan in an almost stream-of-consciousness-style diss that largely falls flat throughout its 4:22 run time. However, she does prove herself capable of making every dead poet roll in their graves by rhyming "her" with "vagin-er."
More similar to a meth-head screaming at no one outside a 7-Eleven on Colfax than a Grammy winner, Nicki's entire flow is confused and bizarre, disregarding the irony of saying Megan is "humpin' on a minor." And that's not even the worst of what she had to say. In "Big Foot," Nicki:
- Says Megan's "flow is such a bore."
- References Megan's mother's 2019 death multiple times: "How you fuck your mother man when she die?" "Swearin' on your dead mother when you lie" and then "Lyin' on your dead mama" repeated a total of seven times.
- Implies Megan uses a ghostwriter and compromises herself to make music: "This little beggin' whore talkin' about Megan's law / For a free beat, you can hit Megan raw / If you a ghostwriter, Pardi in Megan jaw"
- Pinpoints the shooting on several verses: "Kylie kicked you out and made you stumble to the car," "Fuck you get shot with no scar?"
Megan has not responded to "Big Foot" yet. In a tirade on X, Nicki added that she has five songs at the ready about Megan if she "so much as BREATHE wrong," but denied that "Big Foot" was a "diss track" while responding to another X post. Since the tracks dropped, Megan has gained more than 220K followers on Instagram, while Nicki has lost nearly 175K.
If you somehow still like Nicki after all of this, you can catch her at Ball Arena on Sunday, March 3.
