A$AP Rocky: Black Lives Matter Is a “Bandwagon,” Bill Cosby Is “Innocent”
Last fall, A$AP Rocky gave a controversial interview with Time Out New York in which he expressed a reluctance to be politically outspoken. The interview recently resurfaced, and over the weekend, Rocky tweeted a series of defenses before deleting most of the comments. Today, he gave a wide-ranging interview with the Breakfast Club in which he addressed the original controversy in an attempt to clear the air. However, he may have actually ended up digging himself in deeper. Throughout the course of the talk, he referred to the Black Lives Matter movement as a “bandwagon,” declared “all lives matter,” and compared himself to Bill Cosby, who he defended, saying, “I do know he’s innocent.”
Back in the 2015 Time Out interview, Rocky was quoted as saying, “I wanna talk about the fucked-up shit in my life. Not that fucked-up shit I see on TV. Because I’m not there. How am I gonna talk about something I’m not helping? It’s fucked up. It’s a touchy subject.” He added, “I did not sign up to be no political activist. I wanna talk about my motherfuckin’ lean, my best friend dying, the girls that come in and out of my life, the jiggy fashion that I wear, my new inspirations in drugs! I don’t wanna talk about no fucking Ferguson and shit because I don’t live over there! I live in fucking Soho and Beverly Hills. I can’t relate.”
At the beginning of the discussion, Rocky said his Time Out quotes were taken out of context, that he was grieving the loss of A$AP Yams at the time, and reiterated that he feels like he’s being singled out when other artists aren’t:
I don’t know if it’s Thug, Future, Drake, anybody, like, you don’t always hear their content being about, you know, the political shit going on or all that other shit. I feel like, why put me on a pedestal for that, especially when I’m not asking for that? You know what I’m saying? I wanna make music. I wanna inspire. I wanna promote peace, ’cause at a time like this, I don’t have all the answers. I’m not trying to run for Congress. I’m not trying to run for office. I don’t have all the answers, you know what I’m saying?
He called out people who care about African Americans only when police offers are shooting civilians, adding that “all lives matter.”
I just get upset, and what I was really trying to say there was, like, yo, I just, I hate when the bandwagon stuff start. I mean, how come, you know, black lives only matter when a police take ’em, when a police officer takes it? And it should be like, black lives, it should matter when a black life take it. You know what I mean? It should always matter. All lives matter!
He later talked about an incident where he and a friend were tracked by police for trying to break into their own Beverly Hills home when Rocky forgot the security code.
Even for me, I mean, like, not long ago, me and the homie T, we was coming from my house and I guess the alarm, we triggered the alarm went off. I didn’t remember the new code. They came out. They followed us with helicopters for, like, 20 minutes, and shit like that. And we tried to get to a community that wasn’t, you know, wasn’t too much people and stuff like that, and they made us get out in the middle of the street on the floor, all that. All over a misunderstanding, you get what I’m saying?
Eventually, he expressed concern that his comments will tarnish his reputation. He said the situation is like people when ignore the “positive things” Bill Cosby did before accusations of sexual assault were leveled against him.
I wanna start by encouraging everybody to think as individuals, like we said prior, like, you just read a quick little article and it’s, like, my whole legacy I could do things and it’s just like with Bill Cosby. He did so much positive things leading up to one thing, which he was convicted of being innocent for, by the way. People don’t even speak about that, You get what I’m saying? All you remember is the 56 woman and all that kind of shit.
“That’s a lot of women,” host Charlamagne Tha God said. Rocky responded:
Yeah, but he’s a powerful man, you know what I’m saying? Look, I’m not his lawyer, but I do know he’s innocent. In the eyes of the law, they said he’s innocent. You get what I’m saying? So, nobody talks about that. You get what I’m saying? All we know is that he was accused, he allegedly raped however many woman he raped, which, you got, it’s so much issues in the world, you know I’m saying? After we get off the topic of police brutality on the urban kids and the youth and all that, then you gotta talk about poverty, and after poverty you gotta talk about–issues never stop.
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