Rapper Freddie Gibbs recently appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience, and he defended the embattled podcaster’s use of the N-word in a compilation video.
Gibbs said while he wasn’t necessarily happy about the incident, he didn’t think Rogan was actually a racist. In fact, he found the whole thing humorous. “You can’t say that shit, Joe,” Freddie said. “’Cause you pissed n***as off when you did that compilation. It was funny as fuck, though. I can’t even lie.”
“But hey, man, look, I don’t think you’re a racist, my n***a. You my n***a! I fuck with you. I never thought you was a racist. I just think you were saying some shit you shouldn’t have said and a lot of us n****s say stuff that we shouldn’t say sometimes. It is what it is. … That’s the thing, I wanna tell white people right now, y’all just gotta let us have that. Like, just let us have ‘ni**a.’ We got it. It’s one thing, y’all already human trafficked us over here. Let us have that.”
The conversation eventually turned to the Spotify issue and how Neil Young left the service over Rogan’s COVID misinformation. While Rogan clarified that Young left the service before the N-word controversy came out, Gibbs remained adamant that he should have “doubled back for n****s.” He then requested India Arie, who shared the Rogan N-word clip and also pulled her music from Spotify, to return to the service.
After the furor caused by his use of the N-word during his show and the promotion of misinformation about COVID-19, Rogan apologized for the same, although that apology was immediately side-eyed. Spotify pulled down hundreds of past episodes of the podcast but stopped short of removing its star podcaster, who has an estimated 11 million listeners per episode.
