By the way, I will go to my grave believing that forums such as SOHH basically willed the Jay-Z/Nas feud to escalate and turn from a "cold war" to a real, live epic beef on wax.
Before online hip-hop forums, rappers would throw a lot of subliminal shyt at each other that would just come and go without a way for the hip-hop community to fuel the flames. Yes, there were still beefs, but many minor and/or potential beefs never really reached a boiling point.
With places like SOHH, however, every single line of every single song (released or bootlegged or freestyled) could be analyzed to death. Subliminal disses were magnified. Random innocent lyrics that sounded like disses in the most remote ways were interpreted as such and contributed to the tensions.
When the Jay-Z/Nas beef really popped off in the summer of 2001, I just couldn't believe it was actually happening. It felt like
we were all a part of it, as corny as that sounds.