This Is the First Ever Diss Track

The Kendrick Lamar/Drake beef has made it an incredible time to be a hater — and lover of diss tracks. 

In terms of pure enjoyment, it’s easy to understand why we love a good diss track; after all, it combines new music from a popular artist with the excitement of an earful of juicy goss. But while Kendrick and Drake more or less perfected the diss track (or diss tracks in their case), they were far from the first ones to set spilling tea and talking shit to music. 

If we stick to the world of hip hop and rap, the credit for the first-ever diss tracks goes to Roxanne Shante, for her song “Roxanne’s Revenge.” Given the title, it’s pretty hard to argue that it was motivated by anything other than a direct attack. But it also adds a curious little wrinkle, since, if this is her “revenge,” wouldn’t that mean it was a response to an earlier, even more first, diss? 

Logically that would make sense, except that this all comes off of one big whoopsie: The song she thought was about her, “Roxanne, Roxanne” by U.T.F.O., simply wasn't. With her response, though, there was now a real beef, and they continued to trade early iterations of the diss track.

The diss track, however, isn’t a concept completely exclusive to rap, as they pop up in the usually convivial world of classic rock, too. You’ve got Lynyrd Skynyrd's shots at Neil Young on “Sweet Home Alabama,” one ex-Beatle taking a shot at another in John Lennon's “How Do You Sleep?” and even a song all the way back in 1963 from Joe Tex that negatively name-dropped James Brown, who he had no love for even before he stole his wife, named “You Keep Her.”

There is one more, significantly older challenger as well. A song you’ve probably known for the majority of your life and have almost assuredly sung yourself: “Yankee Doodle.” It was written by British soldiers fighting in the Revolutionary War, who regularly sang it directly at their intended target. After all, we know what a Yankee is, but “doodle” meant, basically, an idiot. Meaning, as a side note, that Yankee Doodle is basically just “American Idiot” in old-timey parlance. 

As for calling him a dandy, or a fop, both of those words are deeply entrenched in an unfortunate tradition that continues in diss tracks to this day: questioning the subject’s sexuality. Even the seemingly nonsense word “macaroni” was slang at the time for a borderline-androgynous, overly fancy man.

So why is “Yankee Doodle” now a huge part of American musical tradition? 

Well, we 8-miled it, in a sense. We reclaimed the song, and honestly, singing the same exact lyrics that another country used to make fun of you in a war that they lost is pretty badass. I mean, it’s gotta be disheartening to see the very thing you devised to break the enemy’s psyche popping up on kids’ YouTube channels as part of their “Patriotic Series.”