Joey Bada$$: Bobby Shmurda's Arrest Is A Loss For Brooklyn and Black People

Joey Bada$$ and Bobby Shmurda are both 20, and they grew up close to each other in the rough, Flatbush part of Brooklyn.

Bada$$ criticized Shmurda in his track 'Born Day', which dropped a couple weeks ago, rapping "To tell young Shmurda that he had some better options/You wanna blame the streets that adopted him/Or the doctrine that got his mind so boxed up in/And I don't judge, but there's no one to blame but us/And that's the truth, but it's always swept under the rug."

In an interview with Complex, Bada$$ elaborated on these words. He said that both he and Shmurda rep where they are from, but that he tries to have more of a balance. He added that Shmurda's arrest was particularly harmful in the wake of the Michael Brown and Eric Garner incidents.

"I felt bad like I said [Shmurda's arrests] is an L for Brooklyn. Word up. He’s young and he’s black. That’s an L for us as a whole. And even the fact that everything after the whole Michael Brown and Eric Garner situations, I felt like, you know, they try to use that to cover that shit up. And make us look even more bad. And I don’t respect that. You feel me. I represent us as a people."