You guys probably weren't there for it but Hot 97 used to do this Friday night "Battle of the Beats" and they did the vote for the songs with a vote for the winner. Jay-Z had Angie and a lot of other Hot 97 people in his pocket. He timed it so he was in the elevator coming up into the studio when the winner was going to be announced. Angie was like Jigga on the way up! And then they announced the winner and it was... Nas!
Jay-Z comes out the elevator and it was clear he was blindsided and couldn't talk straight. He was mad homotional. This was brutal to listen to him mumble. A 30+ year old man talkin' bout how his Mom said he went too far and yadda yadda yadda. MF, you thought you were gonna come in there to have a victory parade. Humble pie all over him.
The Rap Pact: How Jay Z and Hot 97 Combined Forces to Take Over Hip-Hop
"Once Jay rebutted with “
Super Ugly,” the station staged a Battle of the Beats-like contest between the two records on Angie Martinez’s afternoon show. “Ether” won with approximately 60 percent of the listener vote. Martinez made the announcement as Jay arrived for a scheduled appearance, and despite the result he stuck around for an interview. He sounded dazed,
almost on the verge of tears. “Me, as a guy, I listened to the last verse [of “Ether”] like, wow, like, wow, you know what I’m saying, it’s just, it’s uneasy, you know,” he said. “It’s, it’s, it’s hard, man. It’s very vulgar.” Only Angie Martinez could have scored that interview."
"Hot 97 thrived on the conflict. A segment was renamed “The Takeover” in which DJ’s and listeners weighed in on the records and the beef and the insoluble question of who was the better MC. It was good content. Good for business. “Our job was to get ratings,” Cipha Sounds says. “Beef was just a way of getting more people to listen. It was all business.”
Though the tension waned throughout 2002, Nas intended to reignite the beef during his headlining slot at that year’s Summer Jam. He planned to hang a life-size animatronic doll painted to look like Jay Z—there were gallows and everything. When the station refused to allow it, Nas walked. Was Hot 97 finally siding with Jay Z? Did their shared history factor into foiling Nas’ plans? “I don’t think so,” says Mister Cee. “It had to do with Nas bringing that apparatus onstage, that was the concern from the station.”
The fallout was brisk: Nas appeared that evening on rival Power 105, where he dissed Flex, Martinez, and, naturally, accused Hot 97 of favoritism. “You gonna tell Nas, me, myself, what I cannot do on a Summer Jam stage when it’s been done—the same acts have been done?” he said, referring to Jay’s disses from the previous year. “Then I dropped the ‘Ether’ napalm bomb, and their whole crew was running like roaches. And now you got that station over there crying because he lost.”"