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Rich Paul’s birthday party just might be the place where it finally goes down. Or so Cam’ron is thinking.
Over the last 14 months, the veteran rapper, 48, has pivoted to an unexpected second act: sports media. These days, instead of finding Cam posted on a Harlem corner or driving down Collins Avenue in Miami with the top down, you can catch him in Las Vegas. That’s where he films his sports show, It Is What It Is, out of a hotel on the Strip. Five days a week, he comments on the daily happenings in basketball and football with a uniquely Killa spin: no-holds-barred and hilariously, profanely blunt. No player or coach is above reproach, or a roasting, when the situation calls for it. Ruffled feathers are a given, and, as far as Cam is concerned, anyone who feels a way can refer back to the show’s title.
But Cam’ron has ruffled feathers for most of his career, beginning with his leadership of the Diplomats, the rap crew whose hunger, in-your-face flashiness, and bold innovation often rubbed their rap peers the wrong way. A recent social media prompt led many hip-hop fans to reminisce on classic moments in rap beef; many shared clips of Cam or one of his fellow Dipset members impishly getting under the skin of some of the genre’s most cool and collected figures.
So far, Cam has not stirred up any similar confrontations in the sports world. But an upcoming celebration for Rich Paul, one of the most important agents in the industry, which would put Cam in a room full of the testosterone-fueled players he’d spent the last year critiquing, feels like the most likely spot for some staticky interactions. “I'm pretty sure I'll bump into a few people I've been talking about when I get there,” Cam says with a shrug a few days ahead of the event. “I'm not backtracking on nothing I said. But don't get in my face.” It’s a flash of the indignant Killa Cam we all grew up on, the one whose beef antics remain unmatched to this day. But then one of rap’s greatest trolls offers a surprising swerve: “Hopefully that doesn't happen.”
Paul’s birthday comes and goes without incident. The only headline of the night was that Cam’ron finally met actress Nia Long in person, after courting her from afar for years, mostly for laughs. It was a welcome anticlimax that symbolized Cam’ron’s new era: mellow, reserved, unbothered. Witness: The Maturation of Killa Cam.
It’s the dead of afternoon on a tranquil, sunlit street on a fair December day in the Las Vegas suburbs. Cam’ron has just pulled up to his house in a white Bentley—an 8.1 on the flashiness scale for just about anyone else, but a decidedly understated flex by Cam standards. (Never forget his hot pink Range Rover.) In a few hours, he’ll head to the Strip to film It Is What It Is; for now, the vibes are decidedly relaxed. Cam is wearing a Dipset track jacket, durag tied tight, while posted on the couch in his tastefully designed modernist living room (all muted grays and earth tones), engaged in his favorite midday pastime: watching ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption with Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser. It’a show he’ll proudly list as the chief inspiration for his own. Though first he references another daytime TV staple: He originally had designs for a “Dr. Phil–style show.” He even has proof of concept, a mock trailer, lying around somewhere on one of his hard drives.
“It would’ve been me sitting down with troubled families and so on and so forth,” Cam explains. “When you watch Dr. Phil, [the advice] is not coming from somebody like me. [He] has degrees in psychology or whatever. But sometimes you just want to hear advice from somebody who looks like you. Say, for instance, somebody comes on my show and says, ‘My wife's been cheating on me.’ I'd be like, ‘Yo, you bugging the fuck out. You can't come home at five in the morning and think your wife is going to be pleased. Y’all ain't been on a date in five or six months. Y'all ain't been on a trip in a minute. What do you think she supposed to do?’ They’re all trying to dissect you mentally and sometimes it's not that deep.”
It’s Not That Deep would be the perfect name for a show where Cam’ron gets on his Frasier Crane and gives advice with an uptown flavor. Alas, he didn’t feel like he had the right team in place to fully execute that idea.
But the show we did get is pretty great. It Is What It Is features Cam’ron alongside his fellow Harlemite, Mase, often fully suited up, at an official-looking desk, breaking down the daily sports news and narratives. Happening upon an episode for the first time, one would be forgiven for assuming it was just a skit or a goof.
But while Cam loves a good laugh, he and Mase are dead serious. Cam started the show in November 2022, filming in a studio space in Miami (where he spent his time outside of New York) with rotating guests. It gained traction on Instagram, where Cam would upload clips and full episodes. After Mase made a few visits, their rapport became the hook that ratcheted up the intrigue; Mase was a mainstay by the following March, when the series migrated to YouTube. “Everybody knows that if Mase don't like something or there ain't no money, he'll be out,” Cam says. “So when he wanted to do it, I said, ‘You sure, bro?’” Mase kept showing up to tape and, within a couple of months, a Cam one-hander with various guests became a duet.
In August 2023, the duo rode the wave of surging popularity to an eight-figure deal with Underdog Fantasy. And so far, the wave has yet to crest. The average episode of It Is What It Is runs close to an hour or sometimes over, with somewhere around 300,000 viewers. But that doesn't account for the distance various clips from any given episode travel on social media, where the pair's banter on certain subjects often go viral.
Your standard It Is What It Is episode features the rappers running down a list of sports topics of the day often with semi-relevant, always funny detours and digressions from their childhood or rap years. (Guests have included controversial football player Antonio Brown and veteran coach-commentator Mark Jackson as “analysts,” as well as rapper Jack Harlow.) The topics are organized—and the guys’ antics reined in—by their cohost and moderator Treasure “Stat Baby” Wilson. Wilson is a broadcast journalism major in Miami who applied to be an assistant and then ended up filling in for Mase on a day when he couldn't make it in. Impressed with how she played off of him, Cam promoted her to be the show's de facto moderator the next day; Stat functions as the straight man of sorts, corralling the topics and keeping the guys on point. Cam has long empowered his protégés, whether it was Juelz Santana and Jim Jones in the original Diplomats or Harlem rapper Vado later on. Bringing people up “is nothing I haven't been doing my whole career,” Cam says.
The aesthetics are where the similarities to established sports shows end. The two Harlem cutups know their shit but bring group-chat colloquialisms to the conversation. Sometimes it’s just as good when they don’t know their shit: On the evening I attended a taping, news of Shohei Ohtani’s record-breaking, 20-year $700 million contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers had just broken. Cam admitted to me that he isn’t much of a baseball fan, and hadn’t had much time to dig into the story before clocking in to tape the show. But the topic comes up as the cameras roll. Mase, without missing a beat, reasons that Ohtani’s bemusing decision to take $2 million payments each of the first 10 years of his contract would be a good strategy to lower any potential alimony or child support payments; Cam’ron and the rest of the people in the studio crack up. That’s the kind of incisive analysis you can’t get from Colin Cowherd.
“Sometimes it's about how you tell the story,” Cam says. “The reason I even came up with this idea for this show is because I'll argue with my friends on the phone about sports. I’ll look at the time and realize I've been on the phone with a n-gga for like an hour and 58 minutes just arguing about sports.”
Cam’ron has always proudly moved to his own rhythms and rarely curbed an impulse or idea because of how it might be perceived or make someone else feel. This is who he was as a rapper—a character who could dazzle with singsong wordplay while still sounding hard (“I get computers ’putin”), be so shockingly and authentically profane that you just had to accept it (see “Suck It or Not”), and could be so effortlessly funny and theatrical that he somehow turned 50 Cent’s very normal government name Curtis into a diss. This is a guy who went on 60 Minutes and told Anderson Cooper that because he’s so deeply opposed to snitching, if he discovered his neighbor was a serial killer, he wouldn’t inform the police. (“I’d probably just move.”) So it should come as no surprise when on the show he mercilessly lambasts Myles Turner’s fit, openly flirts with Joe Smith’s wife amidst their public relationship drama, laughs off the idea of Paul George being “the GOAT,” or chides the Celtics for firing Ime Udoka because “cheating doesn’t make you a bad coach.”
Still, his Days Without Incident meter hasn’t rolled back to zero yet. A recent encounter with divisive Nets point guard Ben Simmons that Cam’ron recounted on air seemed like a percolating situation, but cooler heads soon prevailed. Instead of being angry, more often than not the players he targets are just…hurt. “‘Was my outfit that bad?’” Cam recalls Turner asking him recently. “It was five months ago when we told [Myles] his outfit was crazy. As soon as he seen me, that was the first thing he said—I didn't even know what he's talking about. My man [and social media manager] Bob had to remind me.” Cam’s matter-of-fact response: “I was like, ‘Yeah, it was.’"
Hip-hop and the NBA especially have long been inextricably linked; many rappers and NBA players tend to come from very similar backgrounds and cultural experiences. It Is What It Is hits in part because players are seeing two familiar, relatable faces talk sports—but when the comments turn negative, the same sports figures who relate can suddenly feel betrayed. It’s one thing to get shit from Skip Bayless—it’s another to hear it from a rapper you grew up idolizing.
“We said some stuff about Patrick Beverly and he went straight to our DM, saying, ‘I was a Dipset fan and I loved Paid in Full,’” Cam says. “Because [these guys] grew up watching us, if I say something crazy they're going to feel a way about it more than if [it came from] a random person that's been on television commenting on sports their whole life.” As much as he’s come to understand the impact his comments have, though, don’t expect Cam to hold back and save feelings: “I got a job to do.”
Perhaps the show’s most eyebrow-raising choice has been the inclusion of none other than former Buffalo Bills running back O.J. Simpson as football correspondent. “My argument when it comes to O.J. is: Do I have a convicted murderer on the show?” Cam asks. “No, I don't. You can't convict a man that's been acquitted already. You think he murdered them? Oh, well. But the man was found innocent of what they accused him of and people are still convicting him mentally. I'm just not going to do that.”
And then there’s the “pause” game. Cam and Mase call “pause” on any statement that could even remotely be perceived as homoerotic in nature, a practice Dipset helped popularize during their heyday (when they also popularized the phrase “no homo”). It’s a bit with roots in some of the more dated, misguidedly homophobic mindsets within hip-hop culture, but Cam insists it isn’t negative: “We're from Harlem and that's just part of the culture. And what I tell people is, it isn't a heterosexual gang. I got a lot of gay friends and gay family members.” As much as that may sound like a copout, the pause game is performed on the show as a winking self-parody at this point, functioning as one of the show’s offbeat, albeit sophomoric charms, an extension of Cam and Mase’s playful, lively rapport. (Please enjoy Jack Harlow’s guest episode, where he practically comes armed with statements engineered to break the needle on the guys’ pause meter.)
There’s another layer to It Is What It Is: It signifies one of the most endearing reconciliations in rap history. Cam and Mase grew up in Harlem together, playing basketball with designs on going pro—and skill sets to give that goal weight beyond mere hoop dreams. “I was supposed to go to a Division 1 school—we lost in our first round. I never went back to school,” Cam recalls. “I ended up going to a junior college in Corsicana, Texas, called Navarro Junior College. I got hurt, so I red-shirted my first year. I just had too much time on my hands and ended up getting kicked out of school.”
But then Mase landed a deal with Bad Boy Records. There were very real plans for Mase to bring Cam along for the ride—Mase even brought him to Notorious B.I.G. himself to show off his bars. (“Mase took me to his house to rap for him. I rapped for him for 40 minutes straight. He was in bed with two chicks. I thought that was the rapper's lifestyle, I was like, This is what I want.”) B.I.G. was impressed, but he was shot and killed not long after.
One of Cam’s key breakthroughs was his 1998 hit “Horse & Carriage,” on which Mase, already one of the genre’s biggest stars at that point, handles hook duty. Yet he’s nowhere to be found in the music video—Cam employed a body double. Rumors suggested that Mase wanted $40,000 to appear.
From there, Cam and Mase’s paths diverged and tension grew. By the time Cam became a rapper on Mase’s level, he and his fellow Diplomats—particularly Jim Jones, another lifelong friend—were openly at war with Mase. The diss tracks, subliminal shots, and contentious interviews that followed rank high in the all-time rap-beef pantheon, and became one of those feuds for which burying the hatchet seemed unimaginable.
But during an appearance on the rap podcast A Million Dollars Worth of Game a few years ago, Mase voiced unexpected regret at how things played out; Cam took the gesture as an olive branch and responded in kind. “He said some stuff that really touched me,” Cam remembers. “He was talking about our childhood and how he wished none of this beef happened. And I was just like, word, this shit is all dumb.” Cam went to the same podcast shortly after and told his side. “I went up there and reiterated what he said and then just admitted that I was wrong for the way I handled our friendship.”
The basis for reconciliation was there—someone provided the last link to make it happen. “Shammgod, the former NBA player, who’s now one of the coaches on the Dallas Mavericks, was a mutual friend that we grew up with,” Cam says. “I told him, ‘Tell Mase I love him and I'd like to talk to him one day.’ And that's how we started our communication.” After some phone calls and in-person meetings, the iciness thawed. Last January they even performed “Horse & Carriage” live together for the first time, at the Apollo no less. A layman could watch the show now and never guess the hosts had spent the previous decades in a bitter Cold War.
For all the laugh-out-loud moments they produce, It Is What It Is yields some genuinely touching moments. “Me and Mase are kind of the same n-gga,” Cam says. “There's a lot of shit me and him been through that other people that I'm around may not know. Me and him remembering a lot of shit that we did [in real time] is super cool. Because sometimes he'll bring up some shit that I forgot about, or vice versa.” An interaction that started off jokey turned emotional when Cam asked Mase on-air why he took him directly to B.I.G. instead of Bad Boy proper. Mase takes a moment to carefully phrase his response: "Biggie would do right by you." Last week, on a show taped on Cam's birthday, Mase gave him $20,000—a stack for every year that they did not speak. Cam said he'd likely just spend the money on a gift for Mase.
Back in his house in Vegas, watching Wilbon and Kornheiser, Cam nods at the screen. “PTI is my favorite show…. To me, this is how me and Mase are. I like these two because it’s not like a debate show. If a topic comes up and we have the same opinion, you're not going to force it just to start an argument. These two, you can tell they're genuine friends. You could tell they fuck with each other.”
This is what Cam’ron does now: looks for inspiration for how to create more representation for people of his culture and background. He’s over everything else. “Everything that I wanted to do I, I did it already,” he says. When he’s on dates, he says, he has to contend with women who want to go places and do things he’s done a dozen times already. It also extends to rapping. He might pop up with some bars, like after being inspired by J. Cole’s verse of the year on Lil Yachty’s “The Secret Recipe.” He’ll kick a freestyle to ring in a milestone episode of It Is What It Is. But otherwise, he’s only been releasing “timeless” songs from his hard drive vault when the mood strikes.
He is still stoking the legacy that he and The Diplomats left. He intro’d J. Cole’s last studio album and expects a song they did for Cole’s forthcoming project will make the final cut. And last year, when Drake performed two shows at Harlem’s landmark Apollo Theater, bringing Dipset out wasn’t just inevitable, it would’ve felt wrong if he hadn’t. Drake wasn’t too proud to rock Cam’s iconic pink mink for the occasion; millennial rap fans, ever so protective of the Diplomats’ legacy (and ever so quick to give Drake a hard time), cried cornball. The most popular rapper alive, sure—worthy of wearing a hip-hop grail? Up for debate.
“It's no different from anybody else just trying to show love,” Cam says of MinkGate. “A rapper that's younger than me who grew up watching what we did. I fucking grew up wanting to get a chain because EPMD had the gold link going on, or Big Daddy Kane’s rope chain. When it's somebody of Drake's magnitude, you ought to show love. A lot of people want to criticize and say he’s [too] commercial. He's the modern day Michael Jackson that can also rap. You got to realize the type of run he's on.” (As far as rappers he’s into now, Cam also names Harlow; when I express some surprise at this pick, he doubles down, insisting that he “can really rap.”)
Still, Cam isn’t one to dwell on his own legacy. Before his mother passed, it was an inside joke between Cam and her that she would keep him up to date on whatever anniversary of his the internet was celebrating on any given day. “She used to tell me that shit every day: ‘You know what today is, right? Come Home With Me, 12 years."
But even he can’t wave off the looming 20th anniversary of Purple Haze, his classic fourth album and his own personal favorite. “When I did Purple Haze, everybody was situated,” he recalls. “I was in a great situation mentally, financially, physically, and in a great writing space. I wrote a lot of that album in Chicago and Ohio, which is where I was living at the time. I had some great people around me, I got a lot of inspiration from them.”
For now though, the burgeoning, would-be Killa Media Network is his main focus. Cohost Wilson, now officially a college graduate, has her own spin-off, Check Out the Stat. “I’m excited because I never really worked with a Black woman before [in my] music [career]," Cam says. "So to help a young Black woman do what she wants to do, it's definitely a good feeling.”
There are vets coming aboard as well. “We just did a partnership with [coach turned commentator] Mark Jackson, which is a really, really big deal for us,” Cam says. “Mark's show is coming out. Mase comes back from tour January 20. So maybe around the end of February or March we'll take the show on the road.” He also says he and Mase already have a few songs together, though it’s up to Mase to decide when to drop them.
Prepare to see a lot more of Cam’ron. He half-jokingly mentions asking his and Jay-Z’s mutual friend OG Juan to convince Hov to let It Is What It Is announce Usher at the Super Bowl. Imagine Killa Cam on the 50-yard line, in all his Harlem player glory? On a Dr. Phil couch down the line? Or something else we haven’t even considered yet, some flash of brilliance that channel surfing will spark.
“I think I could do anything if I really want to do it,” Cam says, taking a pull off of a joint, watching Wilbon and Kornheiser wrap up the day’s episode. “You know what I'm saying? No matter what it is, I think I could do pretty much anything.”
