Lil Nas X

Earlier today, popular New York radio show The Breakfast Club interviewed veteran Baton Rouge, Louisiana rapper Boosie Badazz about his recent rant about Lil Nas X. During the interview, Boosie complained indirectly about so-called “cancel culture,” expressing his belief that “straight people… don’t have any opinion” — conveniently overlooking the offensive, homophobic language he used while sharing that opinion, which didn’t need to be shared in the first place.

While granting such a platform to Boosie could be seen as pretty irresponsible on the part of Power 105.1 and The Breakfast Club, Lil Nas X himself was dismissively nonchalant in his own response. While he initially fell back on his trademark strategy of piggybacking on negative publicity to promote his latest single “Industry Baby,” later, he directly addressed the comments, defiantly reminding his followers of the impact such comments could have while shrugging them off at the same time.

“The sh* y’all say about me would drive me crazy if i didn’t already love myself,” he wrote. He also revealed recently that it was only after releasing “Montero” that he felt he needed security, largely because of the sort of comments that folks like Boosie made in the wake of the song’s controversial success. While Nas definitely courted that controversy by pushing boundaries, he had previously detailed how he struggled with his sexuality and his hopes that making songs like “Montero” and “Sun Goes Down” would help others in the future.

Boosie Badazz has made no secret of his feelings about Lil Nas X’s popularity. Despite the backlash over his previous comments in which he called Nas several slurs in defense of DaBaby, Boosie doubled down in a recent interview with New York’s The Breakfast Club. The show, which can be a controversy magnet at the best of times — sometimes even courting it on purpose, as it seemingly did with this booking — brought him on to address his criticisms and the reaction they prompted on social media.

When host Angela Yee asks whether he thought his words went “too far” — which, come on, man — Boosie argued that they did not. “I’ve gotta speak up because, as far as straight people in the world, you don’t have an opinion no more,” he said.

“Everything is harm,” he complained, providing a supremely questionable example. “If you say anything [like], ‘I like women,’ it’s vulgar.” To the hosts’ credit, they did push back on that assertion, Boosie was undeterred, insisting that the entertainment industry is “ran by” queer people (objectively not true; also, so what if it was? You can have an opinion — you aren’t entitled to sharing that opinion, especially if it’s peppered with derogatory slurs and the same rhetoric that gets used to justify oppression and violence against minority groups).

Boosie seems to be completely missing the point of the backlash against him and The Breakfast Club‘s hosts seem ill-equipped to convey it to him. The whole exercise feels a little … pointless. Meanwhile, Lil Nas X is getting huge opportunities like a creative role at Taco Bell even as hateful rhetoric like Boosie’s forced him to hire security. It looks like that the effect of all this will continue to be lost on some folks, which is a shame because there can’t be that much money in hating.