Trolling has become a popular marketing tactic for today's rappers as they attempt to stay in the daily news cycle. According to Hot 97's Peter Rosenberg, the habit extends to members of hip-hop media as well.
In a video uploaded to Hot 97's YouTube page Tuesday afternoon, Rosenberg took issue with fellow radio personality Funkmaster Flex for recently stirring up controversy by pitting Travis Scott against ASAP Rocky. The legendary DJ accused Scott of taking ASAP Rocky's swag before claiming the latter would beat Scott "bar for bar."
"The reason it bothered me is that Flex, just to get conversation going on his Instagram, is basically trying to create a divide between two awesome, important, great artists," Rosenberg argued. "I just didn't understand the point of it."
His point was that no one else had been talking about conflict between Travis and ASAP and there was no pre-existing beef between the two artists. "What's the purpose?" he asked. "Rocky is doing great. Travis is doing great. We need to make fake beef? I'm confused."
Ebro chimed in, "I'm not as upset as you are. I mean, it's kind of like barbershop talk. I think what Flex ends up doing is having conversations that he has behind the scenes, and he just jumps on social media with it and it starts going. Now, is he doing it for clout and likes? Absolutely. Is he trolling it so people talk about it like we're doing right now? Absolutely. Does Flex really sit around in his private time when he's working on cars, thinking about Travis Scott and ASAP Rocky? Absolutely not."
"So, you're saying Flex doesn't really care about it on his home time?" Rosenberg responded. "Like, it's not actually that personal to him. But in order to get a good conversation on his Instagram, he's willing to start making problems in real life with important artists in the culture to make his Instagram hot. Am I supposed to think that's good?"
Rosenberg's theory is that Flex is trolling to create stories out of nothing.
"Why does Flex troll things to create problems between people?" Rosenberg asked. "Flex sometimes needs to look in the mirror about the things he's done with regards to hip-hop in the last 10 years."
Ebro argued that Rosenberg and most other media personalities have been guilty of the same thing on countless occasions over the years. This isn't the first time Flex has pulled controversy out of thin air, though. Earlier this year, he stirred up beef by calling out a group of "wack rappers" by name. More on that in the video below.
