So last week Young Money third-stringer Mack Maine got into some sort of tussle with Chief Keef affiliate Tadoe, who’s best known for holding guns in Keef’s videos and getting pranked on video by his fellow GBE crew members, although he’s actually a way better rapper than the perception of him as another guy’s weed carrier might suggest. This being hip-hop in 2012 the beef quickly moved onto Twitter, with Tadoe calling Mack Maine a “BITCH” and Mack Maine responding with some vague nonsense about “peasants” throwing “pebbles” at the “throne.”
Tadoe was the clear winner in the exchange despite the fact that no one who’s not obsessively deep into the Chicago drill scene knows who he is, while Mack Maine is at least a name that’s familiar to pretty much any guy on the street wearing too much heavily branded streetwear. Mack Maine lost major points by fronting like he owns a throne when in fact his overall image is closer to a guy who lives in an Extended Stay America by the airport, while Tadoe earned about a million points for referring to him as “Mack Mané,” which is probably a typo but if you pretend the accent mark is some kind of super subtle burn it’s incredible.
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All in all this is a completely uninteresting story that no one outside of Tadoe and Mack Maine’s closest friends should even care about, except for one thing. In Tadoe’s tweet where he calls Mack Maine a “BITCH” he also refers to him as an “opp,” and the beef’s blog coverage was the first time I had seen the term used outside of Chicago. In fact it was one of the first times I had ever seen it appear on the Internet outside of the comments section at Fake Shore Drive and the Twitter account of drill queen Katie Got Bandz.
Katie’s not only an up-and-coming rapper who critics all over the world are keeping tabs on, she’s also a teenage girl from a youth culture scene on Chicago’s South Side that’s kept itself fairly impenetrable to outside eyes despite the amount of media attention that’s been directed its way this year. So basically she knows about all sorts of crazy slang that the rest of the world has no idea about. Since about three-quarters of her recent tweets have had the word “opp” in them, and since the only results from an Urban Dictionary search for it are related to Naughty By Nature’s “O.P.P.”—which come on, it includes that definition right in the song—I decided to call her up and get the info direct.
VICE: Hey, what’s up Katie?
Katie Got Bandz: What’s up?
I wanted to talk to you about this slang term “opp” because I follow you on Twitter and you’re constantly calling people opps on there. I’m not sure exactly what it means but it seems like it’s something like “punk-ass.”
An opp is the opposition of a friend. An enemy.
Since you use it so often on Twitter I was wondering if you have a lot of drama going on.
Yeah, everything I do on Twitter, everything I say on Twitter, that’s me.
That’s where the conference call between our two cellphones set up through her manager’s cell started to break up past the point where the recording is at all intelligible. But anyone who’s looking for the newest, most obscure Chicago street slang should keep their eyes open for the million or so collaborations she’s got coming out, as well as the follow-up to Bandz and Hittas that’s lurking somewhere on the horizon. She’s about to shoot a video for the song she did with Fool’s Gold producer Carnage, which if it’s anything like the song itself is going to be crazy as fuck.
