Shaquille O’Neal may be famous for his basketball career and his time on Inside the NBA, but he is no stranger when it comes to the music industry. In fact, the very first rap album Shaq released went platinum. And soon after, he released another that went gold. By all means, O’Neal could have made a career out of this and he almost did, even collaborating with iconic names like Jay-Z, Biggie and Nas. Now, after all these years, he seems to be in the mood to realize that. The Diesel recently released a new song called ‘King Talk’, a single you can find on Spotify. And to follow that up, Shaq has now released a rather interesting tribute to one of his favorite rappers, Machine Gun Kelly.
Back in 2020, Shaq released a list of his favorite rappers, which famously featured the name of Eminem. On that list, there was no mention of MGK, as per Hip-Hop Lately. But just 3 years later, the Big Diesel has declared the 33-year-old as one of his favorite rappers, even dedicating a song to him.
Shaquille O’Neal pays tribute to Machine Gun Kelly
Fans have felt for a while that Shaquille O’Neal is currently doing ‘side quests’ after the conclusion of his illustrious NBA career. He is making progress as a rapper, a DJ, a singer, an actor, an NBA analyst and lord only knows what else. However, even by those standards, his tribute to Machine Gun Kelly is beyond bizarre and unexpected. Especially since MGK had an infamous beef with one of Shaq’s favorite rappers, Eminem. You can see the video of Shaq’s tribute from his Instagram post below.
From talking about ‘smoking’ hookah pipes, to saying he is the greatest, Shaq touches every base in the world during this remix. And because of it, some onlookers just couldn’t help but burst out laughing. Here are just some of the comments.
‘Macy Gray’ notes with this comment on the Instagram post, despite Shaq’s animated riffing of the guitar, it was never plugged in.
“only thing is the guitar ain’t plugged in. other than that – awesome!”
Another user ‘bigreefgq’ made a little reference to the side quests joke, commenting with this on the post.
“Shaq trying get 100% completion on life”
And like many other users, ‘avp2003’ was just confused as to what O’Neal was doing in the first place.
“Wtf he doing with the guitar”
Other reactions included:
“Shaq is like #Snoopdogg he can do whatever he wants”
“put it on Spotify 😍”
Shaquille O’Neal is a very talented man. And DJ Diesel seems to be going from strength to strength at the moment.
Shaq is releasing his first-ever album as DJ Diesel
Shaquille O’Neal has been performing as ‘DJ Diesel’ for quite some time now. Through that persona of his, he has performed at a number of shows and has been a raging success in every one of them,
So, what’s the next move?
The Lakers legend plans to release a DJ album sometime in the near future. And if the performances of his hip-hop albums are anything to go by, this one’s going to be beyond successful too.