This week, Rapper Kosha Dillz released a diss track to hit back at the recent antisemetic comments by recording artist Kanye West.
Dillz’s new song “Death Con 3” calls out Ye (the rapper formerly known as Kanye West), Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minn), Candace Owens and condemns numerous harmful transgressions against the Jewish people that are flooding the media. Here are the lyrics to the chorus:
This for all the right wingers leftists who do
Absolutely nothing and pretend they make moves
For Ye Lovers, Ilhan(ds) and Candace Owens too
you can all get dissed man I’m owing y’all the truth
This for every right wingers leftist who do
Absolutely nothing and pretend they make moves
For Ye Lovers, Ilhan(ds) and Candace Owens too
you can all get dissed I can’t tell who is who
Dillz defines a “diss track” as “When you call people out with lyrics and try to expose them and disrespect them,” he told the Journal “[Kanye’s] being disrespectful to me and everything we [the Jewish people] stand for. Just check my inbox and see what it’s caused.”
The idea to make a diss track came to Dillz after reading a recent article about Kanye on the blog “Modern Wandering Jew.” Dillz included the blogpost’s title “Ye or Nay I’m a Naysayer” into the lyrics of his new song. Dillz also credits the line “From the dreidel to the grave” to comedian Petey DeAbreu.
The song manages to fit 1,274 words in 2 minutes and 19 seconds. The mixing and production are tight and Dillz has an angry-proud flow. The diss track is produced by Grammy-nominated songwriter Sam Barsh (Kendrick Lamar, Aloe Blacc), and mixed and mastered by Mike Machinist of rock and hip-hop band Shinobi Ninja (“Rock Hood,” “Brooklyn to Babylon”). The music video was directed by award-winning cinematographer Matthew Kyle Levine (“Miss Freelance”). The video was shot primarily in Brooklyn, where Dillz grew up. Students from Public School 770 started to crowd around Dillz as he performed the chorus while wearing Tefillin.
Dillz has proven chops as a rapper, and not just in the Jewish community. Since he burst onto the hip hop scene in 2005, he has toured the world and collaborated with several multi-platinum artists, including Matisyahu and EDM artist Kaskade. Dillz’s song “Cellular Phone” played in a Bud Light commercial during Super Bowl XLVI.
Dillz spoke of the sheer disappointment he feels about Kanye speaking harmful words about the Jewish people to millions of his fans — with Dillz himself included.
“I love Kanye West’s Music,” Dillz said. “I’ve even worked with people who have worked with Kanye — I’m one degree away from him. People that I work with wrote on [Kanye’s albums] ‘Yeezus’ and ‘Donda.’”
The Brooklyn-based rapper is the son of Israeli immigrants, born Rami Matan Even-Esh. Although his music isn’t usually confrontational, as a former Division one wrestler for Rutgers University, he knows what it takes to go toe-to-toe with an adversary. And in his early days as a rapper, he cut his teeth in the rap battle scene. But he hasn’t released a diss track until now.
“A lot of people hate confrontation, including myself,” Dillz said. “And for me personally, where I’m at in my life, I was like, ‘No, I need to have confrontations. We could grow from certain things.’”
This past year, Dillz appeared on the rap battle show “Wild ‘N Out” with host comedian Nick Cannon. The show had been canceled in 2020 after Cannon expressed antisemetic comments on a podcast. He later apologized, and began a dialogue with the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Museum of Tolerance. In 2021, “Wild ‘N Out” resumed filming, with Dillz joining the cast in the most recent season.
“I’m on ‘Wild ‘N Out,’ so that’s a show that was once canceled and reinstated for antisemitism, for kind of same thing that’s happening now. But I feel like now it’s four or five times worse by somebody who’s just like, I don’t have to apologize for anything cuz I’m rich and that the Jews control the media. But if you look at the media, the only person they’re writing about is this guy [Kanye]. There’s a lot of irony within it.”
As of this writing, video has over 100,000 views on YouTube, and a Twitter post about the making of the video has over 3.3 million views. While he’s grateful his diss track is bringing a Jewish resilience and practice resistance to the uptick of antisemitism in the world today.
“I think Jewish people are all about forgiving in general, but Jewish people need to be a little bit more down to be telling people to shut the f— up and that’s what I wanted to do,” Dillz said. “There’s plenty of people that do all that other stuff— there’s a lot of people that have opinions, but no one raps. No one has my job. There’s a lot of people with think-pieces and everything, but there’s no artistic expression on it really. And I’m just like, sometimes you just gotta tell people f—you. I think that’s really important.”
Although those two words don’t explicitly appear in Dillz’s song, the prose is as inflammatory and searing. You can read the lyrics in the liner notes on YouTube.
Kosha Dillz’s new song “Death Con 3” is available on Spotify and Apple Music: https://soulspazm.ffm.to/deathcon3
