It’s the surface level analysis for me. Damned near every take Todd had, with exception of how actually kinda fucked it is that both battlers invoked women in their salvos, felt like the exact kind of low-frequency content-ized white analysis that I’d expect from an Adam22 or a VladTV. He displays no real appreciation (at least, not from what I saw) for rap as an art form, doesn’t seem to understand how deep these traditions go for us (or how absolutely aberrant to those traditions that not only Aubrey, but most of the kayfabe rappers on the radio today are to those traditions), but worst of all?

It offends me on a level deeper than rap that Todd’s takeaway in his latest video on the beef even came anywhere near “(rap) gatekeepers versus the gays”. I’m genuinely sick of seeing Black folk-- especially Black men, considering it’s an election season-- constantly getting lined up as some kind of aggressor toward another (usually just as disadvantaged) group. I’m sick of it being taken as a given that “Black men have an anti-Asian problem”, that “Black men are inherently homophobic”, that “Black men are this, that, and the third”–and all I could think in response to that take, after I spent a good two minutes short circuited from how fractally wrong it was, was “this has NOTHING to do with the gays, though?”

Like, I could have let surface-level Ross-ery slide, but the minute it hit me that he wanted to take it there, and simultaneously never once address Aubrey’s actually homophobic (“Abel’s music only plays where boys have a little bit more pride”) and transphobic (“Where is yo uncle at? I wanna talk to the man of the house”) bars, I had no patience for the rest of the subject out of him. I don’t like white folk monetizing our culture, our pain, or our bodies after death-- that last one is why you see so many shots at TrapLoreRoss, btw.