An almost 30-year-old beef between rappers Ja Rule and 50 Cent came to a head Sunday morning on a flight bringing a couple of Fitty’s G-Unit Records labelmates from West to East.
The weapons of choice? Angry words and airplane pillows.
The exchange went down after the unfriendly parties apparently spotted one another on a Delta flight from San Francisco to New York’s JFK airport. TMZ posted video of Ja Rule hollering from the aisle as another man tries to calm him down. According to the celebrity site, he was cussing and saying he wanted to fight.
Voices were raised on both sides of the dispute, which allegedly stems from a 30-year-old beef between Ja Rule and 50 Cent. “Sucka-ass” appears to have been the insulting adjective of choice, along with “old-ass” and “police-ass,” according to HipHop DX.
Ja Rule crowed on social media after the fact, saying Sunday night on X that he had “popped on these punks by myself on a plane lmao … I threw the pillow at yayo head cuz you soft… knocked ya hat all off s— was hilarious.”
Because chucking a mini pillow and knocking off a person’s hat is *thisclose* to knocking off a person. True fact.
But Yayo and his buddy Uncle Murda saw the exchange a little differently.
“Ja got off the plane lol I took his seat,” Uncle Murda said in an Instagram caption on a post that included an after-action video of himself sitting in what he said was Ja Rule’s seat.
Also after the fact, G-Unit founder 50 Cent weighed in with a diss of his own, saying on X that Ja “was by his self so he had to make a scene so they could remove his scary ass,” followed by additional comments that were unprintably profane.
A Delta spokesperson told The Times that there was a disagreement Sunday on an SFO-JFK flight that resulted in cabin crew talking to both parties. One customer was ultimately booked onto a different flight.
The rap feud’s ‘90s origins are a bit murky, with CapitalXtra pinning it either on Ja Rule snubbing 50 Cent after he allegedly had a chain stolen off him by one of 50’s associates while shooting a music video, or on 50 Cent being snubbed by supergroup Murder Inc. — which also included Jay-Z and DMX — during a different video shoot.
Years of insults and diss tracks and pranks and social media posts have followed, with small islands of peace floating by from time to time. Suffice it to say, the men don’t like each other, and those around them aren’t about to cross any lines toward friendship.
Ja Rule told Vibe last year that his beef with 50 Cent was bad for hip-hop, as it fractured the New York rap community. Didn’t seem to do much good this weekend for the flying-public community either.
Moral of the story? If you have a beef, don’t fly commercial.
