Look, most people don’t get it all right all the time. I, too, was a Shaun King fan once.
But most people aren’t off-base about damn near everything. And yet, it seems that every time T.I. or Boosie Badazz get to flexing their tongues or fingers on social media, their takes are likely to always be on the wrong side of social progression. Since they have millions of followers between the two of them, no small number of people hit that “share” button in agreement when either of them get going.
Let Uncle Dustin break it to you: backing either of those horses is probably a bad look.
I’m aware that Boosie is a Louisiana-based rapper on someone’s Apple Music playlist somewhere. But, even as an ardent hip-hop fan, I can’t name one of his songs. But I can rattle off the litany of ridiculous s— he’s said and done on social media (more on that later). Boosie’s name has been ringing out in headlines lately — not because he penned a new bop, but because he’s directed an inordinate amount of attention toward rapper Lil Nas X, my current ‘Hero of Trolling’ and a man who lives rent-free in Boosie’s mind despite being 17 years his junior.
Unfortunately, Boosie has been given space on platforms like The Breakfast Club to marble-mouth his way through explanations on why Nas X is apparently the worst thing Black people have experienced since hypertension.
Boosie apparently keeps getting the boot from Instagram because, according to IG head Adam Mosseri, he constantly breaches the site’s nudity policies. Boosie swears it’s all racism, but however you feel about Instagram’s rules on nudity, them’s just the rules.
His page was taken down once again Sept. 28, prompting fellow problem-in-arms T.I. to don his Zaxby’s-stained cape to defend Boosie.
In the post, T.I. says Boosie is the “Official Representative of Cultural Authenticity.” Jesus, be a salve for my splitting sides.
Sure, T.I. has more cultural cachet than Boosie. But he, too, has found himself in headlines in recent years for all the wrong damn reasons: T.I. defended DaBaby’s Rolling Loud Festival rant, for which DaBaby was “canceled” for about 27 minutes. In 2019, he justifiably caught all kinds of hell for admitting he goes to the gynecologist with his daughter annually to “check her hymen.” Oh, and let’s not forget about those sexual assault charges he and wife Tiny just beat, thanks only to an expired statute of limitations.
While we’re here, Boosie’s rap sheet: He also defended DaBaby’s Rolling Loud rant with the highly-poignant declaration, “Everybody ain’t with their nephew sucking d–. Not everybody with that s–. You just can’t put that s— on everybody and expect it to be cool,” he said on Instagram Live. (As of this writing, the social media site is down…maybe for the good of us all.)
Boosie also came for Zaya Wade, the transgender daughter of former NBA player Dwyane Wade, saying that Wade and his wife Gabrielle Union were “going too far” by supporting their daughter’s identity and doubling down on his comments following the inevitable backlash. Perhaps most appalling – and illegal – in an already impressive list, Boosie claims to have paid for his 12-year-old son to receive oral sex as a means of “preparing” him. For what exactly, I know not.
Rappers espousing troubling social stances is nothing new considering misogyny and homophobia have always undergirded the culture. It would’ve been de rigueur for Boosie to publicly share his opinions about an openly gay Black male rapper like Lil Nas X in the mid-1990s when the F-word flew in bars like cranes in the sky.
At this point, though, Boosie and T.I. are the worst kinds of anachronisms – reminders of a bygone era when it was cool for a culture full of marginalized people to pick on other marginalized people. Of course, there’s still a long way to go when the world’s biggest rappers can still freely and liberally refer to women as b—— on wax, but Rome wasn’t built in a day, I suppose.
T.I. and Boosie are those dudes from your high school who bombard their Facebook pages with “research articles” from MediaTakeOut that “prove” why the COVID-19 vaccine is actually implanting nanochips in your bloodstream to “track” you while gleefully carrying around smartphones. It’s a damn shame, because T.I. is a living rap legend, and now I can’t enjoy my playlist of his music any longer without being reminded that he is, indeed, a f—ing idiot.
I’m not here to tell you what to do. But the next time you catch yourself itching to quote, share or retweet something either of these dudes agree on, stop, sit your device on the closest surface, close your eyes, take a deep breath and ask yourself: Do I wish to get clowned today?
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