A$AP Rocky Sides With #AllLivesMatter, Bill Cosby In New Interview
A controversial interview A$AP Rocky gave with Time Out New York last fall started circulating around the internet last week. In the interview, Rocky expressed a reluctance to take a stand on political and racial issues, and fans started blasting him on social media.
asap rocky cancelled. ungrateful rat. i'm disgusted pic.twitter.com/bORhTuLdHb
— ️ (@phreshoutofdebt) July 15, 2016
First Rocky took to Twitter to defend himself — although most of his tweets have since been deleted — and today, as Complex reports, the rapper stopped by The Breakfast Club to address the controversy and “clear the airways.” Things started off okay, but the rest of the interview’s 41 and a half minutes did not go particularly smoothly. At one point, he called the Black Lives Matter movement a “bandwagon” and declared 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!
Then he went on to defend Bill Cosby, because that’s always a good idea:
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 responded. Rocky replied:
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.
Watch the whole interview below.