Fighting back. Meek Mill slammed the critics who called for him to be canceled over a lyric about the late Kobe Bryant in his leaked song “Don’t Worry.”
In the first verse of the unreleased track, which features Lil Baby, the 33-year-old raps, “This bitch I’m f–kin’ always tell me that she love me, but she ain’t ever showed me / Yeah, and if I ever lack, I’m goin’ out with my chopper, it be another Kobe.”
As the song circulated on social media, fans were up in arms over the line. One Twitter user wrote that the Los Angeles Lakers star, who died in a helicopter crash in January 2020 at age 41, “deserves better,” while another called the entire verse “so trash” that Mill “had to name drop Kobe” to get people’s attention.
The “Going Bad” rapper responded via Twitter on Thursday, February 18, and suggested that the backlash had spread like wildfire for no good reason.
“Somebody promo a narrative and y’all follow it…. y’all internet antics cannot stop me ….s–t like zombie land or something! Lol,” he wrote. “They paying to influence y’all now … its almost like mind control ‘wake up.’”
Bryant and his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna, were among the nine people who were killed in the accident in the Calabasas neighborhood of Los Angeles. The other casualties were pilot Ara Zobayan, 50; Gianna’s basketball teammates Alyssa Altobelli, 14, and Payton Chester, 13; their coach Christina Mauser, 38; Alyssa’s parents, John Altobelli, 56, and Keri Altobelli, 46; and Payton’s mother, Sarah Chester, 45.
Earlier this month, officials from the National Transportation Safety Board said during a hearing that Zobayan became disoriented while flying through clouds and “did not know which way was up,” causing the helicopter to ultimately crash into a hillside. The agency also said it found “no evidence” that Bryant had “placed pressure on the pilot” to continue flying in adverse weather.
The basketball legend’s widow, Vanessa Bryant, with whom he also shared daughters Natalia, 18, Bianka, 4, and Capri, 19 months, filed lawsuits against two helicopter companies in February and September 2020, alleging that Zobayan was “negligent” and that the flight should have been aborted.
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