I was recently reading a site that mentioned Tokona had beef with Sapporo’s finest, Boss tha Emcee. I have to wonder how a situation like this came about if it’s even true, since the two cities of Nagoya and Sapporo are so far apart. But I guess anything is possible in the world of rap music.

I’m not even sure which tracks Tokona used to diss Boss, but I can remember that Tha Blue Herb (TBH) have a song on an album called Rap Wars Donpachi upon which Tokona-X also appears with two members of M.O.S.A.D; Akira and Equal. I’ve listened to TBH’s song which is called Hokubu Sensen Ijō Nashi (北部戦線異常なし) many times and clearly remember Boss saying ‘rap wars’, but didn’t really think anything of it until I came across white sweater’s live door blog. I must question why I didn’t think Tokona had really dissed other artists.

There’s one clear diss track that Tokona-X made before he died which is called ‘Shirazaa Itte Kikaseya Show’ (知らざあ言って聞かせやSHOW), but I thought of this more as a one off. In the song, he talks about someone in the industry; someone who knows nothing about show business at all. The subject of Tokona’s attack is also a ‘playa hater’. Could that really be Boss tha Emcee?

As someone whose Japanese isn’t the most advanced, it’s hard enough to keep up with the general content of each song without paying very close attention most of the time, so it’s possible I’ll miss a lot of complicated wordplay which is just as much a motif of Japanese rap music as it is in English. That makes finding the tracks and specific lines where Tokona-X disses Boss even more difficult. My best option is probably to read as much as possible on blogs to find the clues needed and put the pieces together.

In one way, it’s disappointing to discover that two artists I like had beef, but on the other hand, it’s quite exciting. One of the most exciting things about rap is listening to the diss tracks. If Tokona did beef with Boss, then I aim to find out where they beefed and ultimately the reason for their beef.