Best Hip-Hop Beef

In the world of rap music, beefs are as common as sniffles during allergy season -- Biggie vs. Tupac, Jay-Z vs. Nas and Eminem vs. nearly everyone on the planet. This year, a couple of locals created some offstage fireworks of their own. Lock-N-Load, a record company known for glossy R&B and thug-hop, had a highly entertaining war-of-words with Platinumized, a startup label primarily consisting of Lock-N-Load expatriates. Members from both camps went at it on Lawrencehiphop.com, a portal that usually houses conscious-minded hip-hop pundits. The battle went back and forth for months in the site's popular "Soapbox" forum, complete with page-long screeds, dis songs and empty boasts galore. The fur-flying horrified the Web site's moderators, who reacted by opening a separate "beef" forum in an attempt to draw attention away from the melee. "Where's the Beef?" quickly became one of the site's most popular destinations, leading to a number of stiff policy changes from Lawrencehiphop. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed and the verbal sparring was officially squashed when the two labels opted to let the music -- and sales figures -- do the talking.