Though Lil Baby has credited Gunna for showing him the ropes of music-making, many fans were surprised to hear that he used to pay Gunna to write his raps. But the ATL artist insisted he never released the ghost-written material.
"I done paid Gunna to write my songs," Lil Baby told German outlet 16 Bars. "I never put the songs out, but when I first started to rap I used to pay him like $100 like, 'Imma give you $100,' write something for me so I can try to learn how to go in there and record it.' [...] That's how I used to practice."
The comments caused somewhat of a stir, and highlighted the controversial issue of ghostwriting in hip-hop; however, Lil Baby now appears to be changing his tune, claiming he actually "never" paid Gunna to write for him.
"Gunna ain't never wrote no song for me," he said in a recent interview on Big Boy TV (17:54). "He just showed me how to rap. If he wrote a song, he wrote like what I got going on."
Lil Baby suggested Gunna simply showed him how to express himself, put his thoughts on paper, and deliver the bars, before he eventually learned to do it on his own.
You can hear Lil Baby's comments in the video above.
The 24-year-old rapper spoke about being mentored by Gunna in a 2018 Rolling Stone interview.
"He gave me a lot of insights on how to rap when I first started," Lil Baby said. "The basics, he helped me a whole lot. When I say basics, I mean the real deal—how to record, you gotta go back and do your ad-libs. The simplest thing: how to save a song and send it to my phone."
