Toward the back end of Joey Bada$$ scathing Ray Vaughn and DAYLYT diss track, “My Town,” “My Town,” Loaded Lux embraces the ephemeral thrill of a consolation prize. Stacking a slick Power reference atop a candle metaphor, Lux brings all his battle rap charisma into the type of surgical DAYLYT put-down he hasn’t yet gotten to spit in person: “When niggas who say they want power, ghost the script/Post the the battle, you don’t commit/But what I can do is put it on wax, you know it’s lit.” It’s a fiery line amid the most random battle royale I’ve ever seen. It’s a dope moment. But Lux still prefers the live-action shouts and impenetrable mean mugs of the URL and the like.
“I’m from the arena,” he tells Okayplayer. “When you talking about really getting busy, I feel like that’s top shelf when you talking about high level competition in rap. We battle. When you space and that energy and then you at it with somebody, ain’t no higher level,” he adds. “And I’ve been in all the spaces.”
His latest trip to the on-wax vacuum began with a series of conversations with Joey, who’s currently in the midst of a chaotic, bi-coastal battle royale. “Me and Joey [already] had a relationship,” Lux shares. “He hit me and when he hit me we was just really at first just going back and forth about how it could go, what it is and everything that was going on and talking about how the situation even arose.”
– YouTubewww.youtube.com
Some time after Lux told Joey about his own potentially impending battle with DAYLYT, DAYLYT dropped his Joey diss, “WRD2MIMVA” last Monday. From there, Joey reconnected with Lux for some war room strategy. “[Joey] told me about it after he know what direction he was trying to go, he had a few ideas,” Lux says. “Once he let me know what direction he was trying to go in, I think I did my verse the next day.”
The result was perhaps the best diss track of this increasingly complicated cross-coast rap battle between Joey, Ray Vaughn, DAYLYT, Az Chike and seemingly 100 others. While there are other strong entries, Joey and Lux flaunt a special N-Y chemistry, with Lux bringing literal decades of live battle experiences to the mix. His years in and outside the booth allow him to effectively translate the visceral energy of live death matches to the confines of an instrumental.
“I had the luxury of getting my tutelage in the studio close to around the same time that I started really jumping in the arena,” Lux says. “So I had the best of both worlds. I understand how you have to translate from what you do in raw form. It’s allowing the music to hold its space and then you still being able to do what you do. There’s a synchronicity that starts to form with that,” he adds. “Once you are aware of it, you coloring in the lines.”
Lux clearly enjoyed the moment, and Joey — and probably everyone else involved — appears to be, too. But DAYLYT is withdrawing from the Bada$ side of things. At the end of his latest diss track, “End Credits,” he gave Joey props for his one-man crusade.
“The Ruler’s back, oh, you the man, Joey / Today I crown you the King of New York for taking that stand, Joey / You really took the fade with all of us, a brave man / NY-made man, it should say ‘Immortal’ when your grave land…”
While it’s fun to get jokes off, not every battle has to end the way Kendrick Lamar and Drake’s unfolded. For a true to life battler, DAYLYT’S shoutout is the best case scenario. Evidence that you can live by the pen without having to die by it.
“Life is a fight,” Lux says, adding a philosophical dimension to the conversation. “[The battles] are friendly fire and it’s okay. As long as the competition don’t end in casualties, it’s a beautiful thing.”
