Complex's 50 Best Diss Songs List Is Going Around Again. Here Is Where Every Shady-Camp Record Actually Ranks.

First, a correction to the news cycle: the list did not change this week. Then, the actual Eminem and 50 Cent report card, which is more interesting than the headline.

This week several fan outlets reported that Complex "updated" its 50 Best Hip-Hop Diss Songs ranking. We checked the page itself, and that is not what happened: the live version of the list was published in its current form in May 2025, and it has not been touched since. What actually happened this week is that the list started circulating again, sixteen months later, because arguments about diss rankings never actually end, they just buffer.

Since it is back in the conversation, here is what the current version really says, what changed in that 2025 revision, and where every Eminem and Shady-camp record sits.

The top of the list, and the one big move

The current top five: "Not Like Us," "Hit 'Em Up," "Takeover," "Ether," "The Bridge Is Over." The 2025 revision made exactly one seismic change: Kendrick Lamar's "Not Like Us" moved from 6 to 1, dethroning "Hit 'Em Up" after nearly three decades of consensus and pushing the old top five down a spot each. Kendrick now has four entries in total, with "Like That" at 17, "Euphoria" at 23 and "Meet the Grahams" at 31.

You can argue with a nine-month-old song outranking "Ether." Complex clearly anticipated that argument and made the move anyway, and the Grammys, the Super Bowl and the sales history make it defensible. It is the first list-topping diss of the streaming era, and this ranking going viral again in late 2026, unedited, suggests the take has aged fine so far.

The Shady-camp report card

11. 50 Cent, "Back Down" (2003). The highest Shady/Aftermath placement on the list, unmoved through the revision, and suddenly topical again now that an alleged original version has leaked with disses Dre made 50 remove. Whatever you think of leaks, number 11 all-time for the toned-down version is quite an endorsement of the edit.

18. Eminem, "The Sauce" / "Nail in the Coffin" (2002). The Benzino double-tap, still the consensus pick for the most lopsided victory of Em's career. A magazine owner picked a fight with the best technical rapper alive and lost the magazine.

25. Eminem featuring D12, "Quitter / Hit 'Em Up Freestyle" (2001). The Everlast war, which slid two spots in the revision. Worth revisiting in light of Everlast's own recent comments about the beef being long dead. Both men now speak about it like a bar fight neither can fully explain.

45. Eminem, "Killshot" (2018). Down one spot, and the placement stans will argue about. The most-streamed diss track debut in YouTube history at the time, a clean win by every scoreboard metric, sitting forty-four spots below "Not Like Us." The counterargument writes itself: MGK was never a peer opponent, and lists like this reward stakes, not just execution.

50. 50 Cent, "Piggy Bank" (2005). Hanging onto the last spot, the Jadakiss and Fat Joe spray from The Massacre era.

The blurb that restarts an old argument

The list's funniest Easter egg for Eminem fans sits at number 44, Nas's "Stillmatic Freestyle." Complex's own blurb picks as its best line: "Eminem murdered you on your own shit." A ranking that places Em's highest solo entry at 18 still cannot get through its own copy without quoting the Renegade take, the one Nas aimed at Jay-Z in 2001 and the one that followed both men to the Blueprint anniversary this month.

If you want the bigger picture on Jay and Em beyond one guest verse, here is my take on why they still define two different eras of hip-hop.

That is the quiet takeaway from the whole exercise. Eminem's presence on a diss list undercounts him almost by definition, because his most celebrated combat performances were not diss tracks: they were features, battles and album cuts where the opponent was whoever else had a microphone that year. The lists rank the wars. The reputation was built in the sparring room, and even Complex's blurbs keep admitting it.