Dame Dash has officially released “Cheap Teef,” the Jay-Z and Cam’ron diss he previewed in June, and the finished version arrives under his artist alias Billy Pablo III featuring his signee Nicky Licky. The record is out on streaming with a lyric video, and the spelling changed on the way to release. What most outlets wrote up last month as “Cheap Teeth” is now stylized “Cheap Teef.”
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The title is Dame’s own insult, recycled. During a May 27 interview with Jason Lee, Dame went at Cam’ron, calling him Fredo, questioning his loyalty, and saying he did not like that Cam has “cheap teeth, and they’re so big.” He added that Cam dresses like old school Steve Harvey. Cam’ron, who hosts It Is What It Is, had spent weeks going at Dame over the 2024 Instagram Live where Dame’s teeth fell out on camera. Dame’s response was to take his own line, build a song around it, and point it back at the men who put the dental jokes in circulation.
Jay-Z is the other target, and he is the reason “Cheap Teef” exists at all. At the 2026 Roots Picnic, Jay performed an a cappella freestyle widely read as aimed at Dame, calling him a “chatty patty down on his luck again” and working in a jab about teeth falling out of somebody’s mouth. Dame answered in interviews by saying he thought the rap was bad, then claimed Jay had bad breath during the early Roc-A-Fella days and described it as cinnamon doo doo. That phrase, which started in an Art of Dialogue interview, is now the hook of a commercially released song.
The structure of “Cheap Teef” is worth noting because the credits do not quite match the delivery. Nicky Licky handles the actual rapping. She opens with a bar about elder abuse aimed at Jay, then turns to Cam’ron with a line about who disrespects an OG when that OG helped both of them. She also takes a shot at Jason Lee, using his name as the punchline to a homophobic jab about how the two of them keep fixating on their former label head. Dame sings the hook and the ad libs, mostly about breath, and he does it with obvious delight. The beat is deliberately plain. Nothing about the record is trying to sound like a technical exercise.
The June 16 preview set the tone. Dame filmed it in the back of a Sprinter van with Nicky Licky beside him and captioned it a sneak peek that was too basic and too easy. The reaction was not what he was going for. Cam’ron went straight to the comments and wrote that he really has “second hand embarrassment,” calling the whole thing sad and joking that somebody should run a case study on what happened to Dame. Cam and Mase then spent a segment of It Is What It Is laughing through the bars line by line. Affion Crockett cut a Jay-Z parody response. The clip traveled, but almost entirely as a joke, and releasing “Cheap Teef” for real is Dame choosing to run it back anyway.
That decision fits a pattern people forget about. Dame has been chasing an artist lane for years. In 2018 he put out Culture Vultures with Kenyatta Griggs, an album built around interview audio set to music. In 2019 he fronted a funk rock band called Billy Pablo and the Black Guns and debuted it at a secret show, which is where the Billy Pablo name comes from. In June 2025 his group The Black Guns released the album 365 in collaboration with Freeway, and Dame said at the time that he is usually a businessman but wanted to be an artist and pay homage to real rock and roll. “Cheap Teef” is not a departure. It is the same instinct pointed at a target.
Nicky Licky is the piece of this most people are skipping past. She is Dame’s latest signee, she has a catalog of singles going back several years, and Dame has publicly said she gives him a vibe that reminds him of Aaliyah, a comparison he does not make casually given his history. “Cheap Teef” is now her most recent release and easily her most visible one. Whether that visibility converts into anything is a separate question, because the attention around the song is aimed at Dame, not at her.
The backdrop is a partnership that has been dead for two decades and still generates headlines. Dame co-founded Roc-A-Fella Records with Jay-Z and Kareem “Biggs” Burke in the mid 90s, built Rocawear alongside it, and watched the whole thing come apart over control, money, and direction before the remaining stake went to Def Jam in 2004. Jay-Z became one of the wealthiest artists alive. Cam’ron, who came up under the Roc-A-Fella umbrella, turned a second act as a podcast host into a bigger platform than most of his rap peers have. Dame is releasing “Cheap Teef.”
What happens next is mostly up to two men who have shown no urgency about responding. Jay-Z has never engaged with Dame directly beyond a freestyle bar. Cam’ron already gave his review in an Instagram comment and moved on. “Cheap Teef” got its attention in June and is getting a second wave now, and the beef it belongs to is one Dame is running by himself.
