On This Day in 2002: Nas Skips Summer Jam & Ignites Feud with Hot 97

On this day in 2002, rapper Nas was a no-show at Hot 97's Summer Jam following reports that he planned to do a mock lynching of JAY-Z during his performance.

At that time, HipHopDX reported that a video surfaced of a robotics team making a Jay-Z figure that Nas allegedly intended to hang on stage at Summer Jam 2002, which the radio station prohibited him from doing. The feud between the rap titans dates all the way back to 1996.

On the night (June 26) of the festival, Nas appeared on former Hot 97's DJ Steph Lova's show saying: "I'm here to let my people know why I am not at the Summer Jam. I been bamboozled, hoodwinked and the whole nine ... I'm here to let my people know that I was dissed this morning and told what I couldn't do on the show. Which is really outrageous and shows that the wrong people are in power ... It's really out of hand, and I'm not going for it."

He also denied any claims that a mock lynching of JAY-Z was ever in the works.

Angie Martinez, who resigned from Hot 97 in 2014 to join Power 105.1, responded to Nas' claims the next day. "Management told him not do it," she explained. "Nas then decided if he couldn't do that portion of the show, he didn't want to do any show. We were not trying to protect a specific artist; this was not about politics, money, nothing. This was just a decision that was made. That's the truth."

Eventually, Nas and Angie Martinez aka "The Voice of New York" patched things up, and the rapper returned to the Summer Jam stage in 2012, where he performed alongside Lauryn Hill.

Watch Nas and Lauryn Hill's performance: