“Hip Hop is about being tough and just really being dominant and just being individual with it,” Jeezy explains homophobia in hip hop during a recent interview on the Emmy-nominated series Larry King Now.
“I guess culture-wise it just doesn’t match with it, what Hip Hop represents,” he continues. “You know, Hip Hop is about being tough and just really being dominant and just being individual with it.”
The Atlanta rapper explained that there haven’t been many successful openly gay rap artists because of the culture. He did, however, point out openly gay female rapper Young M.A. Her breakout song “OOOUUU” hit #3 on the Billboard Hot Rap Songs chart.
“It’s a young lady that’s clearly made it,” he said. “Obviously she’s gay but she’s doing very well right now.”
The macho barriers in hip hop have also been broken down by fellow Atlanta rapper Young Thug, who revealed in an interview with V Magazine that he wanted people to “stop believing in genders” and even took the picture for his recently released mixtape No, My Name is JEFFERY.
Born Jay Jenkins, he also discussed the release of his new album Trap or Die 3, Black Lives Matter and a critique of President Barack Obama’s job while in office.
“It’s almost like nobody cares for no black men or black lives,” he said.
He also shared his sentiment towards BLM regarding Colin Kaepernick protests on FS1’s UNDISPUTED with Shannon Sharpe and Skip Bayless.
“I think he’s absolutely right,” he says of Kaepernick’s National Anthem protests. “Just because he’s an athlete doesn’t mean that he has to live by different standards…He’s gotten more headlines by doing that than a lot of us protesting and marching…I commend him on it. Hats off. He’s a class act in my book.”
His views on Kaepernick are quite different from those of Lil Wayne, who went on the show last September. In the interview, Wayne shared his lack of an opinion.
“I’m not into it enough to even give an opinion,” he said. “Somebody had to tell me why he was doing it. That’s how much I didn’t know what was going on, and I kinda still don’t. Somebody gotta explain to me like, ‘Yo, he kneeling because of Black Lives Matter thing and because’—that whole wave just went by me too fast for me to give an opinion.”
