As we've reported, Trinidad Jame$ is feeling a bit of heat for a comment he made at a recent gig in Brooklyn: "Us in the South, we run y'all musically."
Bun B, who hails from Houston, and A$AP Rocky, a Harlemite, have shared their thoughts on the comment in a new interview with MTV.
"Hip-hop left New York in the late '70s, early '80s and went out to the world and I came back," says Bun B. "I threw hip-hop out into the world in 1992 and [A$AP Rocky] came back. So, once you give it to the world, when it comes back to you, you can't be mad at how it comes back to you because you sent it out there in the first place. We can't be critical, too critical of situations because we have to keep everything in its proper perspective. Hip-hop started in New York, so if you're an emcee... you're already trying to be like New York, so it don't make sense for somebody to say New York tryna be like them. We're all students of the culture. We're all taking in information and giving it back out. It's just starting to look different than maybe it looked originally. It's starting to sound different than maybe it sounded originally. I can understand his viewpoint. There's some validity to that, but that's happened in hip-hop before, where other regions have been so enamored by what's happening from here, that we want to be a part of it. You can look at hip-hop fashion today and everybody in hip-hop really dressing like Europeans. Nobody's talkin' about that. You're either dressing like a European or a Japanese person. We sent hip-hop to Europe and Japan and that's how it came back. Now, we're taking notes from their influence and giving it right back to somebody else. That's how it's supposed to be. If you're in Texas and all you doin' and all you know and everything in your life is just Texas, then you've blocked yourself out of a lot of great things in this world. That goes for every region. Hip-hop started out as a regional thing. It was very segregated. Like everything else in this world that involves segregation and division, we've got to tear that down."
Word. Rocky also commented, albeit much more briefly:
"It's not really about who run what. Everybody got [their] time, but people don't want to enjoy that until it's gone."
Thoughts? Below, listen to Trinidad's new track "L.I.A.A.R.S.", which addresses the situation, and peep a brief response from Action Bronson.