Layzie Bone of seminal Cleveland group Bone Thugs-N-Harmony would like younger artists—Migos, specifically—to provide them with "respect."
Speaking with—and please join me now in emitting an exhausted sigh—TMZWednesday, Layzie elaborated on the issues he apparently has with what he perceives as a lack of "homage" among the current generation of creatives.
"I'm just here to set the record straight," he said. "Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, we did a lot and to be overlooked in the capacity of disrespect, it's all around the board right now. It's in R&B. It's like the young guys against the old guys, but really that's not what it's about, man. It's about paying homage to the bricklayers, to the ones that came before us. No disrespect to them guys for what they're doing, you know. All power to the people . . . They do possess a talent, you know what I'm saying?"
Circling back to the absence of homage, Layzie sees it as integral. "You have to show respect," he said. "How would you know where you're going if you don't know where you came from?" Glamour, he added, isn't a part of it. "We gon' show the world that we are that great group," he said. "We one of the greatest. We gon' kick they ass because that's what we gonna do . . . This ain't about no fame or getting no pub, but if you claim the greatest, all I'm saying is, in hip-hop, we comin' for your neck."
All this started after Migos understandably referred to themselves as "the greatest of all time," which prompted a fairly immediate response on Instagram from Layzie Bone. However, if you're at all familiar with music history, you'll know that this is literally a cycle that has repeated over and over across multiple genres and cultures: a younger generation of creatives start steering the zeitgeist to the chagrin of previous generations, inspiring a back-and-forth that tends to be wholly unnecessary.
