The 25 most iconic non-rap diss tracks of all-time

The fracturing of the Beatles has been documented extensively over the years, and in a post-Fab Four world, all members got to explore their most unbridled impulses, pivoting to a panoply of different genres. Paul McCartney hewed close to his buoyant pop-rock stock and trade, and his second solo effort, "Ram", was a collaborative record with wife Linda that radiated good vibes and is considered one of the foundational records of modern indie-pop. Yet "Too Many People", the B-side to "Admiral Halsey" and album opener, made no bones about being directed to Paul's acrimonious split with John Lennon. "You took your lucky break and broke it in two," he warns over buoyant acoustic chords, citing Lennon as the reason for the band's dissolution. Lennon responded with "How Do You Sleep?", a late-album track off of his legendary "Imagine" full-length. Amazingly, Lennon goes in even harder, noting that "Those freaks was right when they said you was dead" and that "The sound you make is muzak to my ears." The two tracks were both released in 1971, but the two had only started to reconcile prior to Lennon's murder in 1980.

Lee "Scratch" Perry is one of the most fundamental producers in all of reggae history, and the quickly-recorded "People Funny Boy" is considered one of the genre's first-ever songs — and it was absolutely a shot towards his employer and fellow producer Joe Gibbs. Allegedly, Perry's writing and production work for other artists was being used without crediting or compensating Perry under Gibbs' Amalgamated Records, which is exactly what Perry ran into when he broke with Clement Coxsone Dodd's Studio One prior. Perry thought Dodd would never take a chance on a country boy like him, and Perry got increasingly worried over Gibbs and Dodd's close relationship. "When you were down and out / I used to help you out / But now that you win jackpot / You don't remember that," croons Perry, in a song that quickly became a hit. Gibbs' response track "People Grudgeful", coupled with B-side "Pan Ya Machete", was intended as a point-by-point response to Perry's accusations while parodying his musical style. This came along with a new angle of calling Perry two-faced, much as how both sides of a Spanish machete are very sharp. Whatever the issues were, they clearly got worked out, given both artists were touring Europe together the following year.

Prior to the wave of assault allegations in 2020 that derailed his career, Marilyn Manson had only recently been evolving from the shock-rock sound that launched him into prominence. While all sorts of goth-adjacent bands had formed in the wake of Manson's success, it was My Chemical Romance who began turning into a genre figurehead, as 2004's "Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge" and especially 2006's "The Black Parade" shot them into the mainstream. While Manson never called MCR out by name, "Mutilation is the Most Sincere Form of Flattery" was widely considered a swipe at the band, especially with lines like "Rebels without applause / I sell my shadow to those who are standing in it," before launching into an expletive-laden post-chorus. To their credit, the band never responded with a track, just noting in the press that they viewed Manson as a musical inspiration. Sometimes the easiest way to squash a beef is just not to acknowledge it.

If you thought Kendrick Lamar was going too far with calling out Drake's family members on "Meet the Grahams", we welcome you to Joni Mitchell's 1994 shocker "Not to Blame", which was directed at her ex-boyfriend Jackson Browne after it was alleged that he had hit his then-girlfriend Daryl Hannah. While no formal charges were ever filed, Mitchell was blunt about her feelings. "Your charitable acts seemed out of place / With the beauty with your fist marks on her face," she croons, then referencing his son and how "His mother had the frailty you despise / And the looks you love to drive to suıcide." His son's mother was Phyllis Major, who took her own life in 1976. While Browne never responded with a song, he was direct about his feelings about the track in the press, referring to Mitchell as "violent" and "very embittered."

While Halsey and The 1975's Matty Healy were never an official couple, the two's appearances on each other's social media proved they at least had some sort of kinship, and when you look at the lyrics of "Colors", it's clear the song can't be about anyone else. With lines that reference Healy's little brother and his TV actress mom, "Colors" is less of a diss track and more of a warning about self-destructive behavior, evidenced in lines like "You're only happy when your sorry head is filled with dope / I'll hope you make it to the day you're 28 years old." Healy, in similar fashion, allegedly responded with similar softness on "She's American", referring to an American girl who's "inducing sleep to avoid pain / And I think she's got a gun divinely decreed and custom made," before warning himself "Don't fall in love with the moment / And think you're in love with the girl." Some fans have even speculated that a later beloved track, "Sincerity is Scary," is also about Halsey, but for the most part, it seems the pair have moved on from their complicated feelings towards each other.

Unsurprisingly, Taylor Swift has several songs on this list, because while multiple tracks are traced back to non-musical paramours, other times she is responding to famous musicians quite bluntly. With the Jonas Brothers' "Much Better", the once semi-entangled Joe Jonas makes it abundantly clear who he's referencing with the line "Now, I'm done with superstars / And all the tears on her guitar," before noting the girl in front of him is "much better" than the last. The girl in question is allegedly Camilla Belle, who apparently wooed Joe away from Taylor, and Taylor, in turn, commented on this in the country-rocker "Better Than Revenge". The chorus goes to the mat: "She's not a saint and she's not what you think / She's an actress / She's better known for the things that she does / On the mattress." While the Jonas' song can be misconstrued as pointed and even a little mean, Taylor's track has often been called divisive, bordering on slūt-shaming, which is a pivot she turned into effective commentary on latter-day vault tracks like "Slūt!".

When Justin Timberlake dropped his first solo single, "Like I Love You", the reception was mixed. The Neptunes-produced banger didn't even hit the Top 10 of the U.S. Billboard charts, but that all changed with the release of "Cry Me a River". With a music video that laid out its inspiration clearly with an obvious lookalike stand-in, the song traces Timberlake's bitter split from fellow pop star Britney Spears, how the bridges were burned, and now it's her turn to cry. The Timbaland-backed beat is weird, moody, and cinematic, thus kicking off a successful artist-producer collaboration that would last for years. Spears never responded in song, but in her 2023 memoir, she pulls no punches about Timberlake's deeply questionable behavior during their relationship, leading to Timberlake later apologizing for using the song and video to help color her in a bad light.

Olivia Rodrigo's proper solo debut, "Driver's License", was as natural a megahit as there ever was, taking tabloid also-ran material (who truly cares about the romances that happened on the set of "High School Musical: The Musical: The Series"?) and turning it into nothing short of a generational anthem. No one knew who Rodrigo was, but her songwriting and sharp throwback production turned all known streaming and chart logic on its head, topping the Billboard Hot 100 for eight straight weeks, turning her debut album into an event, and eventually netting her a Best New Artist Grammy. The song is filled with heartbreak, allegedly all about her co-star Joshua Bassett leaving Rodrigo for Sabrina Carpenter. Yet when your song becomes a pop culture touchstone, how do you even respond? Bassett tried, and while his 2021 song "Lie Lie Lie" was thought to be about Olivia, his later track "Crisis" explicitly referenced this period, opening with "My label said to never waste a crisis / And here I am, guitar in my hand, in the middle of one," and later noting "If you get to tell your truth, then so do I / And it's cool if you want me to play the bad guy." The song's bitter sentiments did not have the same reach as Olivia's, and Bassett's later very-public conversion to a Christian church with some questionable positions has all but halted any career momentum he had.

Music is a universal language, and diss tracks are very much a part of that lineage. Yelle is a French electro-dance artist who took issue with the rap group TTC. While rapper Cuizinier had long been known for his deeply misogynistic lyrics, it was his 2004 track that some claimed was about Yelle, who at the time had not even started her music career. The track was filthy and braggadocious and only furthered the band's controversial reputation. In 2006, Yelle responded by starting with an opening salvo of a dance track called "Je Veux Te Voir," which was originally uploaded on MySpace under a title that alleged Cuizinier had certain anatomical shortcomings. The song was an instant viral hit, and the fact that the lyrics called the rapper out by name gave it additional bite (to say nothing about her mocking their raps about owning a high-end car when she knows he still has to take public transportation). Yelle has gone on to release music at a regular clip and, in 2007, even guested on a French chart-topper by comedian Fatal Bazooka. Meanwhile, TTC disbanded in 2013.

Most Eminem albums feature a comedic lead single that is filled with pop-culture references and often mocks other public figures, with his targets often being women. Christina Aguilera was just one of the many targets in Eminem's "The Real Slim Shady", and she pushed back heavily on his assertions with the song "Can't Hold Us Down". "When a female fires back / Suddenly big talker don't know how to act / So he does what any little boy would do / Makin' up a few false rumors or two," she sings on the opener of her sophomore album "Stripped". While rapper Lil' Kim drops some lines of her own, most of the bite is reserved for Aguilera's verses, which try to take the high road: "If you look back in history / It's a common double standard of society / The guy gets all the glory, the more he can score / While the girl can do the same and yet you call her a whőre." Both went on to have many more hits and from what we can tell, neither mentioned each other past 2002.

Evanescence was the band on everyone's lips in 2003, with Amy Lee's powerful vocals and the band's propulsive rock sound initially causing some confusion (they briefly appeared on the Christian album charts before the band clarified, definitively, that that was not how they'd classify their music). Yet the staying power of "Bring Me to Life" and the emotional ballad "My Immortal" had legs on radio for months on end, which is while the wait for a follow-up record certainly took some time, the band never truly left the mainstream. "Call Me When You're Sober" is a dramatic number that caught some off guard, as the lyrics seemed to be especially pointed, with Lee eventually noting that they were inspired by dealing with ex-boyfriend Shaun Morgan's difficulty with sobriety. In fact, the day the song came out, his band Seether announced the cancellation of a world tour as Morgan was entering rehab. A year later, Seether released "Fake It", which, like Evanescence's track, doesn't call anyone out by name but notes of a partner changing the reasons for a breakup before noting they're a hypocrite. To this day, it remains Seether's most popular song by far, more than doubling the streaming numbers of their second-biggest hit, "Broken", featuring Amy Lee.

In the mid-2010s, the alleged rivalry between Taylor Swift and Katy Perry was one for the record books. All based around an alleged slight involving headhunting someone's dancers for a tour, Swift kicked it all off with "Bad Blood" from her star-solidifying pop pivot "1989". While often cited as one of the worst songs of her career, its vague enough lyrics started the fan speculation that the track was about Perry, and by 2017, her catty "Look What You Made Me Do" music video seemed to reference some of Perry's iconography directly. A few months prior to that single, Perry dropped her own response with "Swish Swish", an awkward club track that vaguely talked about keeping receipts while making strange allusions to how a tiger doesn't need the opinions of "a shellfish or a sheep." The song is often cited as the inflection point for the collapse of Perry's commercial prowess, but never fear: the two very publicly made up on the set of the music video for Swift's 2019 song "You Need to Calm Down".

As you've seen on this list, diss tracks based on bad breakups are fairly commonplace, especially when dealing with once-entwined pop stars. Ed Sheeran's strutting "Don't" and Ellie Goulding's response track "On My Mind" were never officially confirmed by the artists to be about the other, but what's fascinating is how many details they share, especially when noting how much they were drinking together. Sheeran makes a jab about seeing the female protagonist kissing another man (which is presumed to be indicating One Direction's Niall Horan), while Ellie's track claims to know nothing of what he's talking about, noting that "You don't mess with love / You mess with the truth." It was a he-said/she-said kind of disagreement, but this somewhat softer war of words ended up with both artists turning their lamentations into genuine hits.

All the members of the Jackson family found some degree of solo success, but some more than others. Jermaine Jackson released over a dozen full-lengths under his name since 1972 and scored enough minor hits to have two of them be certified Gold (selling half a million copies). Yet in 1991, he was feeling some sort of way about brother Michael's superstar success, and not only wrote a song about it but made it the lead single to his new album so the world could hear it. "Word to the Badd!!" was re-recorded after the shocking reaction to the original version, but that version is what people remember: an absolutely damning takedown of Michael that seems to stem from hogging too much of the spotlight. "Once you were made / You changed your shade / Was your color wrong?" he opines, before jumping on a rap bridge where he singles out Michael's hits and describes him as taking from his pie. Allegedly, a new signee to LaFace Records, the girl group TLC, was on background vocal duty while Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes served as the rap break ghostwriter. Despite reaching the lower rungs of the Hot 100, the track left a negative impression with many, hence a re-recorded version that did nothing for Jermaine's momentum. A month after the release of his album, Michael dropped "Dangerous", and let's just say it was certified a few rungs higher than Gold.

Industrial goth music was around in the '80s, but it was Trent Reznor's Nine Inch Nails moniker that began pushing it to the mainstream in the '90s. Around the same time, he was frequently seen sharing a fanbase with shock-rocker Marilyn Manson, which made sense given the two were label mates. After touring with him, an unspecified incident between Reznor and Manson lead to the creation of "Starfūckers, Inc.", a song that satirizes rock stardom. "My god pouts on the cover of the magazine / My god's a shallow little bıtch trying to make the scene," Reznor opines over industrial breakbeats and a raging rock chorus. The song was off of Nine Inch Nails' landmark 1999 album "The Fragile", and while it was eventually released as a "Promotional Single" with an accompanying music video in 2000, there were many surprises for scene-sters following the feud, mainly that the woman Reznor is with in the back of a limousine for a majority of the film is revealed at the end to be Manson in drag, signaling whatever beef they had was squashed. It makes sense, too; Manson co-directed the video.

Early in 2002, Eminem claimed to be in a six-month relationship with Mariah Carey via tracks like "When the Music Stops" and "Superman", which she has strenuously denied. She does, however, acknowledge that the two were in communication during "Clown", a diss track from her 2002 record "Charmbracelet" that insinuated she should have never given him her number and that he's sad and alone. That album, however, was caught in the post-"Glitter", pre-"Emancipation of Mimi" doldrums of her career, so no one paid attention. Eminem revived things with the 2009 track "Bagpipes From Baghdad", which took shots at her as well as her then-husband Nick Cannon. One month after that song dropped, Mariah responded with "Obsessed", a biting track that packs much more wit and venom than "Clown" did. "You on your job, you hating hard / Ain't gon' feed you, I'mma let you starve," she coos, before later stating "I'm the press conference / You a conversation." In the music video, she dresses up as Eminem as well for additional mockery, with all of the buzz of the track leading to a late-era Top 10 smash for Mariah. Eminem eventually responded with a non-album single called "The Warning" that failed to even chart.

The histories of London's The Sex Pistols and New York City's New York Dolls are hugely intertwined, as Malcolm McLaren managed both outfits. Members were flown in and out, and ultimately Johnny Rotten's Sex Pistols didn't feel that the cross-dressing American group had the same punk bona fides that they did. Thus, "New York" a track off their legendary 1977 debut album, is widely considered to be about the group, claiming they put on bad shows before hurling hostile slurs at them. Johnny Thunder, one of the Dolls' guitarists and songwriters, hit back with his own solo number, "London Boys", the following year, countering Rotten's verses almost line-for-line before insinuating that Rotten has a moneyed past and that "You sit at home / You got a chaperone." One final middle finger comes from the recording itself, where former Sex Pistols members Paul Cook and Steve Jones play guitar and drums (respectively) on the track.

Cyndi Lauper's groundbreaking pop success is a product of the '80s, and while she put out records in the '90s, they never sold particularly well. In the 2000s, however, she realized she had massive cult status among gay and dance crowds, and her 2008 comeback album "Bring Ya to the Brink" was designed to cash in on that notoriety, working with cool alt-dance acts like Basement Jaxx, Axwell, and Dragonette. Swedish electropop producer Kleerup, still fresh off the success of working on Robyn's legendary "With Every Heartbeat", helped bring the track "Lay Me Down" to life. On his 2008 solo debut, he marries new songs with his previous hits, including "With Every Heartbeat". Allegedly, he asked Cyndi to allow him to include "Lay Me Down" as well, and she refused, which led him to include the instrumental for the track on the record with no vocals outside of himself singing the phrase "Thank you for nothing" over and over. Kleerup has spoken more warmly about Cyndi in interviews since, but it's fairly obvious the two are never going to work together again.

In September of 1989, SPIN Magazine ran a feature wherein Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon conducted an interview with LL Cool J, a rapper she had long admired, having spent much of her youth out in California and appreciating the scene. The interview started promising, with the two noting the connections and commonalities of both the early rap and hardcore punk scenes, but when Gordon asked about his female fans and LL's own status as a sex symbol, he noted that if boyfriends got jealous of girls pining over him, "It's not my problem. The guy has to have control over his woman." Gordon spun the piece into something of a feminist critique of not only that misogynist mindset but also her own privilege, channeling it all into the Sonic Youth hit "Kool Thing". While some digs are clearly aimed at LL (opening line "Kool Thing sitting with a kitty" referencing his new album cover where he's kneeling next to a panther), she also mocks herself for asking so much in a pop star interview setting, using Chuck D as an LL stand-in while she asks "I mean, are you gonna liberate us girls from male white corporate oppression?" It's very tongue-in-cheek, but even if you didn't clock all of that backstory when it was pumping out of radios in 1990, it still make a hell of an impact. Some might even call it "Kool."

The oft-mythologized fling between Taylor Swift and John Mayer was allegedly brief, and certainly brief enough for Taylor to appear on a John Mayer song called "Half of My Heart" only to see "Dear John" get released four months later. "Dear John" is considered a landmark track in Swift's discography, explicitly calling out the age gap between them while dropping acid-tipped lines like "You are an expert at 'Sorry' and keeping lines blurry." Mayer described the song as humiliating and cheap but would come back with his own response three years later with the song "Paper Doll", where he seems confused as to how things ended up the way they did. The chorus is similarly pointed: "You're like 22 girls in one / And none of them know what they're running from." The song is well-composed, but by showing up a full three years after the initial jab, its impact was significantly blunted.

Neil Young's legendary "Southern Man" isn't directed at one particular entity, instead lamenting America's racist past and asking if modern mindsets will ever move on. "I saw cotton and I saw black /  Tall white mansions and little shacks / Southern man, when will you pay them back?" he sings with urgency, making for a highlight on his classic full-length "After the Gold Rush". While Lynyrd Skynyrd hadn't even debuted when that track came out, they felt emboldened after the success of their debut and wanted to address how people from the Southern states so often get wrapped up in this narrative. On "Sweet Home Alabama", the band addresses "Mr. Young" and notes that he put the South down but that the South doesn't need him, the single cover art displaying the Confederate flag. The track went on to become the band's signature song, and in a 2012 biography, Young fully noted that his own attitude towards "Southern Man" has changed: "I don't like my words when I listen to it. They are accusatory and condescending, not fully thought out, and too easy to misconstrue."

After serving as the music producer for legendary runs in the careers of Missy Elliott and Justin Timberlake, Timbaland wanted to snag some hits for himself again, and his guest-heavy 2007 record "Shock Value" aimed to do just that. For the most part, it worked, with "The Way I Are" with Keri Hilson and D.O.E. becoming a minor radio staple and then giving OneRepublic their breakthrough with "Apologize". Yet the record's lead single was a weird, mean-spirited throwaway called "Give It To Me", where disses were flying everywhere: Timbaland took aim at Scott Storch for claiming he helped make "Cry Me a River", Timberlake directing ire towards Janet Jackson for blaming him for the infamous Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction ("We missed you on the charts last week / Damn, that's right, you wasn't there," he sneers), and Nelly Furtado spat fire towards Fergie for an unclear "lyrics mixup" incident months prior. It's a bizarre pop curio, and the only one who bothered to respond was producer Scott Storch, who grabbed the mic and gave us the godawful "Built Like Dat". All but scrubbed from the public consciousness, Storch even shot a video for his diss, which contains a few bars of bite but is delivered so awkwardly it's hard to take seriously.

Pavement was kind of becoming a thing in 1994. The slack-rock indie outfit was riding high off of their most commercially successful song to date, "Cut Your Hair", off another critically beloved full-length. Yet the third single from their sophomore LP "Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain" was called "Range Life", and it was noted for its third verse, which noted that the Smashing Pumpkins were "Nature kids /  They don't have no function," and that the Stone Temple Pilots "deserve absolutely nothing." Of course, songwriter Stephen Malkmus was being sardonic, but the Pumpkins' Billy Corgan didn't take it that way. While Corgan didn't respond in song, it was alleged that he managed to get Pavement removed from that year's Lollapalooza by threatening to cancel all their dates if the band remained on the bill. The gambit worked, and while Corgan still had things to say years after the fact, both bands simply moved on.

Long before a series of sexual misconduct allegations ground his career to a halt in 2020, Mark Kozelek had a reputation for being difficult to work with. While he has a lionized body of work in the slowcore rock movement, spread across his bands Red House Painters and Sun Kil Moon, his curmudgeonly reputation has only increased over time. While his spat with journalist Laura Snapes over a piece she was doing on Kozelek spilled over into its own song with misogynist lyrics, Kozelek's beef with the band The War on Drugs was simply due to bad sound bleed during a live set that annoyed him, later calling the group responsible for nothing more than "beer commercial" music. He made several comments about the group online before issuing the song "War On Drugs: Suck My C@&%", wherein he bemoans the group's sound and addresses past festival controversies he was involved in, as well as again using misogynistic language against another female journalist who wrote a negative review of his show. The War on Drugs feud made blogosphere news, and the band's frontman Adam Granduciel made a podcast appearance where he made his opinions about the whole incident clear: "I don't have time for idiots." In response, Kozelek released another song called "Adam Granofsky Blues", where he uses the singer's real name in the title and just reads back Granduciel's interview transcript over a basic guitar line while giggling. Classy stuff.

Brand New's Jesse Lacey and Taking Back Sunday's John Nolan were best friends for years, but after it was alleged that Nolan made a move on a girl that Lacey was into, everything fizzled and got bitter. How bitter? Enough for the bands to take shots at each other through some brutal songs. Brand New's "Seventy Times 7" was the first bullet fired in the war, where the theme is betrayal and wishing ill upon the subject, as the lines "Have another drink and drive yourself home / I hope there's ice on all the roads," sums up the sentiment pretty well. Nolan responded in kind with "There's No 'I' in Team", where Nolan trades lines with bandmate Adam Lazzara and at one point even responds to that "Seventy" bridge line-by-line. "Best friends means I pulled the trigger / Best friends means you get what you deserve," they scream, with the track soon becoming one of their signature numbers. The two did eventually bury the hatchet, and Lacey would routinely come on stage during tours to perform the track with the band.