Mysonne answers Jay-Z’s Target freestyle with a letter to Hov

Mysonne has responded to Jay-Z’s Yankee Stadium Target freestyle with an a cappella verse of his own titled “My Letter to Hov,” and the answer is far more complicated than a diss. The Bronx rapper spends most of the record praising Jay-Z before arriving at a single accusation, that in defending the Target deal Jay-Z fired on the people who were actually doing the work.

The praise is not throat clearing. Mysonne opens by saying nobody is better than Jay-Z and that he set the standard for lyricism, giving a nod to Nas in the same breath before crediting Jay-Z with the larger global impact on rap. He calls the transformation from a kid selling crack in the projects to a Black mogul something that should be studied, points to the technical craft of “Reasonable Doubt” and how Jay-Z moved through those beats while describing street life, and says thirty years later the work sits as classical. He credits Jay-Z with teaching a generation that dedication leads to elevation and that escaping death and incarceration was actually possible, and with breaking down the doors of corporate America using punchlines. He specifically credits him with making the industry pay for what it did to the Cold Crush Brothers.

Then the letter to Hov turns.

Mysonne acknowledges the position Jay-Z occupies, that everywhere he turns someone is tearing him down, whether it is Illuminati talk, lawsuits or people discussing him in interviews, and he name checks Jay-Z’s own song “Lucky Me” to make the point. He argues that Jay-Z has quietly stood in the gap for Black people for years, from Trayvon Martin to Colin Kaepernick, bringing people home from jail and funding movement work without taking credit for it, and still catching shots from his own. He adds that he knows what actually happened with the Kaepernick situation and then declines to discuss it, which is its own small landmine sitting inside the record.

The turn lands on the boycott. Mysonne says that when Jay-Z decided to fire back this time, he hit allies rather than critics, because the people organizing against Target were his own. He points out that they got the community to stop shopping there and that Target lost billions and came pleading to be put back on the market. He directly concedes the argument Jay-Z made about other corporations, agreeing that Meta and Google are guilty as well, and answers it by saying history and strategy pointed at Target, so the movement concentrated there on purpose.

Jay-Z’s freestyle came on July 10, opening night of his three night Yankee Stadium residency celebrating thirty years of “Reasonable Doubt” and twenty five years of “The Blueprint.” He flipped the sellout accusation into a boast about selling the stadium out three nights, said he does not listen to activists typing online, and challenged critics over whether they had also left Amazon, Meta, Google and YouTube. His position was that people are picking and choosing which giants to abandon in a marketplace controlled by a handful of companies.

The boycott he was answering has been running since early 2025, when Pastor Jamal Bryant called for a nationwide economic protest after Target scaled back its diversity, equity and inclusion commitments. It has been one of the most effective consumer campaigns in recent memory, contributing to roughly a $12 billion drop in Target’s market valuation, a change in chief executive and more than a thousand jobs cut. Jay-Z’s limited 30th anniversary “Reasonable Doubt” edition, pressed on white vinyl with an alternate cover and premium packaging, was sold exclusively through that retailer.

What separates this response from the pile of takes Jay-Z has absorbed for two weeks is who is delivering it. Mysonne co-founded Until Freedom with Tamika Mallory and Angelo Pinto, relocated to Louisville in the summer of 2020 to organize around Breonna Taylor, and worked the campaign to free Meek Mill. He founded Raising Kings, which runs inside Rikers and in city schools, and he was appointed to Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s criminal justice transition committee ahead of the administration taking office in January.