Beef is alive and well within hip-hop in 2026. Now, two of the underground’s most prominent rappers are bickering back and forth, calling each other wack. It all started when JPEGMAFIA was interviewed by Pigeons & Planes , where he declared himself the king of experimental rap. In the process, he took a not-so-subtle shot at Earl Sweatshirt. “I’m already the best in this space of experimental rap. There’s no one who competes with me. People cannot do what I do. So me naming it ‘Experimental Rap’ is just me laying claim to something I already had,” JPEGMAFIA said. Videos by VICE “Other people in this genre, they want to pretend and try to be cool and be like, ‘I don’t want to be experimental rap. I want to be something else, I want to f***ing rap like Lucki. I want to make songs that the young people make,’” JPEGMAFIA said, shading Earl Sweatshirt and his new music. “I’m not having a midlife crisis, musically, so I don’t really need to do that.…