Ice Cube was already coming under fire from his audience, despite releasing a series of four arguably classic solo records, each released only a year apart from one another: Amerikkka’s Most Wanted, Death Certificate, The Predator and Lethal Injection. Criticisms were hurled at Cube among his fanbase for various reasons, such as borrowing (jacking?) the beat to Grandmaster Flash & Melle Mel’s “The Message” for the “Check Yo’ Self” remix, despite Puffy doing it again successfully three years later. Cube was also criticized for ripping off the hook to Cypress Hill’s “Throw Ya Set In The Air” for “Friday,” as well as trying to balance the contradicting reckless lifestyle of a gangster rapper and that of a straight-edged member of the Nation of Islam in his music. When he took aim at the East Coast with Westside Connection after working with Public Enemy, the Bomb Squad and Das EFX just a few years earlier, fan frustration with Cube had reached the boiling point. Common’s response record couldn’t have been better timed, capturing the sentiment of the hip-hop audience at the time.

“I just kind of smiled, like, ‘Okay, I see how it is,’” Common recalls. “I probably wouldn’t even have reacted further if Cube and his people hadn’t kept talking about it. Westside Connection went on BET’s Rap City taking trash about me. That brought my Chicago up. So I decided I needed to bust back with a track. That’s how ‘The Bitch in Yoo’ was born.”

Common was working primarily with Chicago producers No I.D. and Dug Infinite at that time, who released Accept Your Own and Be Yourself (The Black Album) on Relativity Records in 1997. “I don’t think No I.D. wanted to do the beat. For one he was working on his album, but I don’t think he wanted to be pulled into the beef. He wanted to be more the producer that worked with everybody. So Com went to get Pete Rock to do it,” Infinite recalls.

“I remember getting a phone call from [Common] saying how upset he was about getting disrespected by Ice Cube. I told him, ‘If you need my help, I’m here,’” producer Pete Rock revealed in 2011. “He came to New York and we hung out at a friend’s house. I made that beat at a friend’s house with records that I had given him so he could make beats, because he made beats too. I left them over there, [so I used the records] and came up with the track. I couldn’t believe that [Common] would like it. I thought I would have to go home among my stuff. He was right there with me when I made it.”

DJs Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Garcia debuted the track on their legendary WKCR radio show in 1996, but in a different incarnation than the version that was released at retail. While the first verse was unchanged, the unfinished demo version that was aired included two deleted verses, which were not about Ice Cube. Rumors swirled that the demo version’s second verse was aimed at Common’s label mate Fat Joe, who released the single “Shit Is Real” in 1993. Common’s verse started out “If it’s really real Joe, let that shit show for self / No need parading guns, murders or your wealth.” It was speculated by fans that the verse was changed because Common and Fat Joe were both members of the Relativity Records roster. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.

“That had nothing to do with Fat Joe,” says Infinite. “Joe is a term in Chicago that they give to somebody when they don’t want to just call you by your name. ‘What’s up, Joe?’ Or Charlie. If you really don’t want to give him honor by calling him his name, you’d call them a Mark, a Vic, a Joe or a Charlie.”

The origins of the slang go back even further: during the Vietnam conflict, when “Viet Cong” was shortened to “VC” or “Victor-Charlie” in the NATO phonetic alphabet. “When the enemy was out there he was a ‘Charlie.’ When older cats from Chicago came back from Vietnam, they started addressing people that they didn’t have love for as Charlie. That went into Joe and all of that other stuff. So that’s all that was,” Infinite adds.

“The first time I performed the song was down in Atlanta at this music festival,” Common recalls. “Cube and his people were also on the bill. I didn’t know who else was out in that crowd, but I didn’t really care. ‘Man, fuck Ice Cube!’ I was thinking. So I had them turn down the beats, and I spat that first verse a capella. The crowd went wild. A few weeks later, I performed the song at the House of Blues — the House of Blues on the Sunset Strip in L.A.! They loved it too. That made me write another verse talking about ‘even in your town, they be loving my shit!’”

The song was finally released as a promotional single, with No I.D. and Dug Infinite’s “The Real Weight” on the b-side. It was given official release on a Relativity Records compilation called Relativity Urban Assault. The end result was perhaps one of the most scathing dis records ever, firing on all cylinders as Common was able to verbalize exactly what fans were feeling about Cube at the time. Loaded with clever puns, he called him out for pandering to the East Coast and then rebelling against it (“Went from gangsta to Islam to the dick of Das EFX”). He blasted him for contradicting Muslim teachings (“Hypocrite, I’m filling out your Death Certificate / Slinging bean pies and St Ide’s in the same sentence”). And perhaps most brutally, he ended the song by using Cube’s own lyrics against him (“In the immortal words of one, a bitch is a bitch.”)