Talib Kweli On His Wild Ride On Social Media

Is Kweli attacking people or getting attacked?

I have Talib Kweli on my podcast Toure Show this week because he’s an old friend and of course we got into his whole social media reputation. It’s a bit of a thing. Kweli has had several moments of conflict online but was he attacked or was he attacking? Was he being petty or righteous? Kweli’s social media life has become a part of his image—someone wrote an article for HuffPo saying they used to love him but social media has changed everything. I’ve never heard Kweli talk about it. He was very happy to get into it—after the show he thanked me for going into this because, he said, no one ever asks. This is a piece of a larger conversation, you can hear the whole thing on my podcast, but I think this gets at a lot of how he feels. 

Toure: I don't want to talk about any specific incidents that have happened online or whatever. I don't want to get in the weeds of, well, this one said this or that, but when we look at a larger picture, should we say Talib is always fighting with somebody or somebody's always coming at him and he's always defending himself? Because you're getting in a lot of fights online.

Talib: The fact is that there's a misconception about me that when I was on social media, because I'm largely not anymore, but when I was on social media, that I, the people—my detractors, my ops—will tell you that Talib's a bully and he's so mean. What they're not telling you is that never in my history on Twitter or Instagram, have I ever gone to someone's page and left a comment on their page.

Toure: So what have you done?

Talib: I stated my opinion on my page.

Toure: So you feel like you're always defending yourself.

Talib: They come to my page. They say mean things. They attack me. Most people in my position would ignore that. They would say nothing. They would ignore that. And most people in my position would give me the advice to ignore that. I don't take that advice.

Toure: Why not?

Talib: The main reason, one, I have fun doing it. That's the main reason. I'm a very blessed, privileged guy. I don't do much that I don't enjoy doing.

Toure: Ok.

Talib: I enjoy the discourse. I enjoy the endorphins you get from it.

Toure: Do you think that sometimes you look like a bully in these exchanges?

Talib: I'm not concerned with the perception. People quote the Jay-Z lyric to me all the time, you know, “A wise man told me don't argue with fools/ Cuz people from a distance can't tell who's who.” Well then, motherfucker, come closer.

Toure: LOL.

Talib Kweli: Why are you commenting from a distance on some shit you can't hear? Of course both people look like fools from far away. Come closer, listen to the argument, and figure out what side you're on.  

Toure: That makes sense.

Talib: If we don't push back on them, they have an effect on our society. Donald Trump's Presidency being one of them. Jaguar Wright's ascension being another one. Jaguar Wright is where she's at is because she started out talking about the Roots and me and Common and Badu and Jill Scott. When she did that, all of us—with the exception of me—were like, I'm not going to say nothing. Ignore her, she'll go away. I said that's the wrong move, fellas. These people are cancerous. If you ignore disease, it festers and grows.

Toure: You may have seen this article on Huffington Post [“Talib Kweli Continues To Dim His Own Star”] where a brother talked about how much he loved your music…

Talib: Oh, that was a very shitty article.

Toure: He talked about he nicknamed himself after one of your songs…

Talib: Where's my phone at? [Starts looking around for it.]

Toure: …and he’s saying the social media stuff has turned him off.

Talib: I’m gonna pull this article up.

Toure: There was a time where you seemed like this amazing MC who was above it all. He's wise. He's deeply read. He's an intellectual. And as we got to know you more as a social media person, some people said, I don't like the person I'm getting to see on social media.

Talib [Reading the Huff Po article]: So what this guy wrote in the Huffington Post is not based on facts. It's based on something he heard. He says I’m, “attacking and trolling people on social media.” I've never attacked anybody on social media. I don't troll anybody on social media. These are lies. He's stating this as a fact. It's not a fact. I need to see proof. Where's your proof? Where in this article is proof that I attacked anybody? There is none. I have a huge problem with this. This is supposed to be journalism. Show me a tweet where I attack someone. Show me a tweet where I troll someone. Show it to me. Put it in the article. It's not even in the article. But I'm the bad guy? Why? Because I was banned from Twitter? I was banned from Twitter because I was a threat to white supremacist groups. The Proud Boys came after me, David Duke came after me, all of them came after me and they would start smear campaigns. I had people calling and emailing my mother threats. I had people making videos, threatening me…

Toure: Why’d you get kicked off of Twitter?

Talib: This is where I slipped up. I was getting the threats on the phone. I researched it to find out where the phone call was coming from and I found out it was a dummy phone number. Because it was a dummy phone number, I posted the threat [where someone is threatening him] on Twitter and I didn't block the phone number out, thinking it's not a real number so they're not going to have an issue with it. They contacted me immediately. They said to me, look, we get complaints about you all the time, but you've never broken the terms of service, however, you just posted this phone number and because you posted this phone number, at the end of the day, you're not going to have a Twitter account anymore. So this idea that I got kicked off for harassing a Black woman, no.

For the whole story check out Talib Kweli on my podcast Toure Show.