I will make this work, because it is my passion and dammit, I am great at it. I have no idea what happens next, but I do know from here on out, I am not looking back, and I am not quitting music. I don’t give a damn about being a part of the right social circles. I don’t give a damn about what others think of me or have to say about me. The goal of bullies is to intimidate you, to declaw you, to strip you away from who you really are, and try to convert you into a more acceptable version of who they think you are.įuck all of that. Fuck playing by whatever imaginary rule book society tries to place on you. And I indeed make no apologies for who I am, the words I sing or the art I make. From the start, I was going to be myself and make no apologies for it. My team, my friends, believed in me.įrom the start, my music was to represent and give voice to the type of people who were probably picked last in gym class.

I remember how stressed out I was the day we shot the video, and how my friend David told me not to worry about anything.

We were a bunch of misfits who decided to be ourselves on camera. The comments and dislikes became so bad that we had to disable the comment section. Within moments, negative comment after negative comment poured in: everything from “you’re trash,” to “you’re ass,” it was an avalanche of schoolyard bullied insults (See screenshot below). Within hours, the little video that I had worked my ass off to get right - that I had put every ounce of my energy into and had to put in extra shifts at my full time job just to finish paying for it- had blew up in my face. With a Hip-Hop audience of over 400,000 followers, I knew for sure that Laka’s audience would love me, that they would embrace me, that they would declare me the next big thing - boy oh boy, how very wrong I would be. I released my music video for my single “I Am Joe Budden” on Halloween through popular YouTube channel Laka Films. It had all the perfect ingredients to ensure its success: originality, creativity, and the type of contradictions that make the internet, the internet.

It was supposed to be the “one.” It was supposed to be, or I thought it would be, the music video that would take my music career to the next level.

Stand up to bullies wow legion