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Kanye West crusade against unfair music industry contracts has filled Twitter lately, but he also took the time to apologize to Harlem rapper Ma$e for clowning him on his 2010 song “Devil In A New Dress.”
“Ma$e is right about that line,” Kanye wrote on Twitter. “I always felt funny about that line … Ma$e is one of my favorite rappers and I based a lot of my flows off of him … I’m the king of ‘ooh can I get away with this bars’ so I reap what I sow when the next generation does the same to me.”
On “Devil In A New Dress,” Kanye refers to Ma$e’s leaving the rap game at the height of his career in 1999 to become a pastor, rapping:
Why you standing there with your face screwed up?
Don’t leave while you’re hot that’s how Ma$e screwed up
Throwing sh-t around, the whole place screwed up
Maybe I should call Ma$e so he could pray for us
Kanye’s mea culpa comes after Ma$e called him out last week in an Instagram caption:
[Kanye West] much of what you are feeling has been expressed before. But when I was saying it, the same system and mindset that you are fighting against today, used you to shame me for leaving the very same system! Remember, your famous line “Don’t leave when you hot”? I know today you may see it very differently so… You owe me (and my family) a public apology and then some, if anyone owes you one. For alluding to the fact that me following God at the height of my career was a bad decision.
The lyric has taken on a new meaning in recent years as Kanye, much like Ma$e in the late ‘90s, had a religious awakening and vowed to no longer make secular music.
Read all the lyrics to Kanye West’s “Devil In A New Dress” on Genius now.
