Lil Yachty has let his rap contemporaries know that he can’t be touched with a freestyle shared on social media.
The 25-year-old rapper posted the freestyle on Twitter on Saturday (March 25), which contained an extended snippet of his 2022 collaboration with DC2Trill, “Set It Off Freestyle.”
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In his caption, Yachty made sure to put some bravado behind his bars, saying: “I be quiet… but seriously I don’t think u n-ggas can fuck wit me when it comes to this rap shit.”
In the video, the Atlanta native is seen in various scenic areas while rapping over Strafe’s 1984 electronic hit, “Set It Off.” “Set It Off,” along with Bruce Hornsby’s 1986 rock classic “The Way It Is,” was the musical ingredient that Big D The Impossible used to create 2Pac’s posthumous 1998 single “Changes.”
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“I treat all of my hoes like they equally fine/ Rearview got Grammy noms, not cutout pines/ Told my dog, ‘Hold shit down, you gon’ get richer’/ Had to crop out dead weight for the bigger picture,” he raps.
Check out Yachty’s tweet below:
Lil Boat has long been on a mission to prove his naysayers wrong. His latest album, Let’s Start Here, marked a drastic sonic shift for the “Minnesota” hitmaker, swapping his signature trap sound for a more ambitious, psychedelic rock experiment.
At a listening party for the project in New York City in January shortly before its release, Yachty spoke about his desire to be taken seriously as an artist and wanting to move away from having the “mumble rapper” tag attached to his artistry.
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“This album is so special and dear to me,” he said. “I think I created it just because I really wanted to be taken serious as an artist, you know? Not just some SoundCloud rapper, not some mumble rapper, not some guy that just made one hit.”
He added: “I wanted to be really taken serious because music is, like, everything to me. I respect all walks of music, not just rap and Hip Hop. Everything. So I think I wanted to make something to show the world just how great it was to me.”
However, Yachty’s comments didn’t go down well with some Hip Hop fans, who felt he was disrespecting the very genre that birthed his career.
“I hate how rappers don’t even respect rap as an artform,” one person wrote on Twitter. “Why does ‘I want to be considered an artist’ always follow with them making some shit from another genre.”
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Quick to defend his remarks, Yachty wrote back: “It’s not about respecting rap, it’s about being respected as more than a rapper. I create music in more than just that lane.”
