Freddie Gibbs

Freddie Gibbs has had up to here with all the music documentaries that have come out lately — including one in particular that seemingly prompted him to tweet his thoughts on the matter earlier this week. Certainly, there has been a proliferation of self-produced documentaries by entertainers aiming to do some mythmaking, from big names like Kanye West and his Netflix-based Jeen-Yuhs to Hulu’s Look At Me: XXXTentacion, which was produced by the controversial rapper’s family, to Lil Baby telling his own life story with Untrapped on Amazon Prime.

As Gibbs put it, “Everything don’t need to be a documentary.”

However, given recent history, it would seem his comments were directed more at one specific rapper than any of those named above. Especially since, the night before he tweeted, Buffalo rapper Benny The Butcher shared a trailer for Long Live DJ Shay, a documentary he made about a local Buffalo DJ and his personal mentor who passed in August of 2020. Shay was instrumental in building out Buffalo’s burgeoning underground music scene, giving local rappers both beats to rap on and venues to perform in, and was particularly invested in the rise of Griselda Records, Benny’s crew, and arguably the biggest names to rise from the upstate New York scene to date.

Of course, little of that would matter to Gibbs, with whom the Butcher has been fighting a bitter feud involving restaurant fisticuffs, stolen chains, and black eyes on stage. (Side note: “Freddie” and “Benny” don’t sound like the names of two dudes who should be rap beefing. These are Sandlot character names.) Their conflict has since cooled to a passive-aggressive war of extremely petty words, and Fred’s most recent tweet would certainly fall in line with that. Benny hasn’t responded — yet — but maybe he’s finally going to take the hostilities to the studio and rap about it on his new compilation tape dropping this week.