Jelly Roll was on a roll this past weekend (no pun intended).
Normally when I’d say that, it would be because Jelly Roll was putting in work with new music, or giving it his all on his cross-country tour. But this weekend, the rapper-turned-country-artist was putting in work, but just in the sense of shouting out an internet troll.
Most people online think that the trash talking they do is sent out into a void, as if you were yelling into the sky and shaking your fist at the clouds. But that’s the beautiful (and ugly) part about social media: There’s someone on the other side.
One X (formerly Twitter) user shared a message about Jelly Roll in a post, saying:
“I know people can question my music taste but I’ll never listen to a guy named Jelly Roll I can’t do it.”
They didn’t even tag Jelly Roll in the post, but it got back around to him, and the “Need a Favor” singer decided that he wasn’t going to let that negativity slide. Jelly, whose real name is Jason DeFord, sent this back in response:
“Imagine being the kinda human that won’t listen to someone’s music because of their name. Same kinda people that teach hate, division and spread negativity. It’s alright, I was young, toxic, and didn’t care about other people once in life as well.”
BOOM! Respectfully roasted.
And I should’ve said “welcome to Jelly Roll’s thread” earlier, because there’s more where that came from. Jelly’s next response was a little more heated, but still painted a very transparent picture about how foolish of an argument the social media user that started the drama likely had:
“Imagine this person now having to call their mom and vent about their day and start by saying ‘so I was talking sh*t about this musician I don’t know and he said something back to me and then other people started being mean to me’ – legit…That’s a real thing (that’s) happening.”
If that’s not social media in a nutshell, I don’t know what it.
This next post that Jelly Roll sent out encapsulated the social media experience as well, while also letting his followers and fans know why he was choosing to take time to respond to the initial mean tweet/post:
“If we know each other personally and you speak about me publicly, I will never respond publicly because if you know me personally, we can talk about it privately. But if you’ve never met and you talk foul of me your a f***ing fame obsessed lame. Period.”
Out of all the posts, that one was likely the most fiery, though it was still warranted. Those first three posts were all in one day, with the last two sent out within minutes of one another.
After Jelly Roll took some time to cool off, he posted one last message about the debacle and honestly put a great exclamation point on the whole thing:
“I normally don’t let stuff bother me, sorry that was out of character- only human y’all. Sometimes I think I need to defend myself but like my Nan always said ‘you can’t reason with stupid.'”
Jelly also had a message for the original poster, who questioned why Jelly Roll even took the time to respond to her:
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that he meant to write “you can’t reason with stupid” there. I’d say the entire world wishes that you could reason with stupid. Jelly Roll, if you are reading this and I got that wrong, feel free to call me out on it.
All in all, I think this entire dialogue over the weekend was warranted. Jelly Roll had every right to defend himself, and it just goes to show that social media users should be more careful sending out those “I hate (insert artist name here)” posts.
