Jay-Z & DMX’s 1990’s Bronx Battle Revisited

Ski Beatz, Sauce Money, and the Ruff Ryders’ co-founder Waah Dean tell some lesser known facts about the Bronx battle on a pooltable between the Roc-A-Fella honcho and Darkman X.

At some point in the mid-early ’90s, at a small, smoke-filled pool hall in the Bronx, a Brooklyn-based emcee named Jay-Z battled an up-and-comer from Yonkers known as DMX. X, who cabbed in to town from Baltimore just for the event, stated in his 2003 autobiography that he had no original intentions of getting involved that night. He was there as a witness, who’d only enter the fray if absolutely necessary. And, soon enough, it was. “The people knew that were the top dogs of our crews,” he wrote, “and they wanted us to go at it and after a few more rounds, I just couldn’t stand to the side anymore. It was time to hold down the fam.”

To this day, details of the battle between Jay (who was an affiliate repping Original Flavor at the time) and DMX (who stood alongside an Uptown-based group called the Harlem Knights) remain murky. So HipHopDX caught up with three people who were in attendance—Original Flavor member Ski (n/k/a Ski Beatz), Jay-Z/Original Flavor associate Sauce Money, and Ruff Ryders co-founder Waah Dean—to learn more about what went down that night. Each of the three admitted that many of the specifics have faded from memory, but that they’d recall what they could.

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