Jadakiss was a guest on a recent episode of I Am Athlete, where he discussed his group, The Lox, regaining its publishing, getting past his beef with 50 Cent, and thanking Sean “Diddy” Combs for not playing hardball with the group.
Several years ago, Jadakiss, Styles P, and Sheek Louch had a campaign where they publicly pleaded to Combs to allow them to get back their publishing. They went to the streets and local radio stations to bring awareness of their plight.
“When we had this situation, we knew that we couldn’t win financially, in litigation, in court. The little bit of pennies we had at that time would’ve been gone after two court dates. The only power we got is the streets,” Jadakiss told the I Am Athlete team.
“Once we decided to go against [Diddy], he had
the power to block us from ever putting a song out ever again,” Jadakiss said. “We didn’t have no leverage—really besides the street. We had mixtapes, we had people behind us who thought we would be great artists in the future. If we gonna do it, let’s do it. But just know, it could go all the way bad.”Eventually, the management team for the Lox, RuffRyders, bought them out of the Bad Boy contract when it paid Combs $2 million, according to OkayPlayer. They also gave Combs the royalties from Jadakiss’ first solo project, Kiss tha Game Goodbye.
The Yonkers, NY, rapper also acknowledged that Combs wasn’t being difficult while negotiating the buyout and that he could have made it worse.
“Shout out to Diddy also because he could’ve played much harder ball than he played.”
Jadakiss, affectionately called Kiss, is doing well outside the studio. Last year, he launched a family business with his father and son, Bob Phillips and Jaewon Phillips, called Kiss Café—a coffee line four decades in the making.