Did Joyner Lucas Try To Start A Fake Beef With DaBaby?

If anybody had to hazard a guess about why beef is so prevalent in hip-hop right now, they might conclude it’s just good business. After all, Future and Metro Boomin’s We Don’t Trust You song “Like That” debuted at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 behind Kendrick Lamar’s fiery challenge to Drake and J. Cole, and J. Cole’s corresponding response, “7 Minute Drill,” debuted in the top five, despite being deleted just a week after its release. So, there might be a method to the mayhem — and apparently, it’s inspiring plenty of imitators, according to DaBaby.

In a recent interview with Shaquille O’Neal (cancel culture ain’t real, y’all), DaBaby maintained that amid all the chaos, he was contacted by another rapper with a business proposition: Start a fake beef to generate buzz. DaBaby didn’t reveal who the other rapper was — only allowing that it was a “lyricist” — and said he turned him down out of respect, not wanting to work his way into a shoot (basically, start off with a fake beef and end up in a real one). However, plenty of fans on Twitter (never calling it “X”) had a theory of the instigator’s identity: Joyner Lucas.

Enough users have posited Joyner as the culprit that he even felt he had to defend himself in the comments of DJ Akademiks’ post about it. “Man why tf everyone in comments saying it’s me?” he wrote.

Well… It certainly seems like the sort of thing he’d do. We all remember the back-and-forth he got into with Tory Lanez back in 2018, to say nothing of his longstanding beef with Logic, which he admitted in 2020 was caused by “jealousy.” He’s also the rapper who came to public notoriety thanks to high-concept swings like the viral “I’m Not Racist,” which attempted to make sense of recent protests from the perspective of a concerned white observer.