Keyshia Cole On O.T. Genasis’ Sexist Bullying And Feeling Alone
This past weekend, Keyshia Cole opened up to Dreamville’s Ari Lennox about the bullying she’s had to deal with from O.T. Genasis over Instagram Live.
There’s been tension between the two artists since they first clashed over O.T.’s Crip-inspired remix of her R&B classic, “Love.” When Cole voiced her disapproval, O.T. unleashed a barrage of verbal assaults.
To make matters worse, the “Push It” rapper took things to a new level after he made some disgustingly sexist comments about Cole and brought up her mother’s drug addiction.
“Honestly...I’m just not going to talk about that situation. But it just pissed me off so much because you know, at a time that everybody was going through so much in the Black community, getting killed and all that ….you want to do a whole song that I wrote about love and make it about shooting, killing and bang-banging,” Cole told Lennox.
The “Heaven Sent” singer added that she felt shunned for even speaking up in defense of herself, recalling a prior conversation with hip-hop legend MC Lyte.
“I was just saying how it felt like I was so unprotected,” she continued. “The more that I even tried to speak up for myself or say how I didn’t like something, that it was like ‘ Oh...you come from the hood. You really ain’t sh*t. Your mom was on drugs your whole life.’ ‘You don’t really have a right to feel what you feel about what you’ve created.’ ‘Lighten up.’ ‘Why are you taking everything so seriously? It was just a joke.’”
When things reached a boiling point, Cole shared that she personally tried to reach out to O.T. through her industry connects to resolve the matter but it doesn’t seem she received a response.
Cole concluded that O.T. should be the one extending an olive branch.
“It should have been more like ‘My agenda didn’t fit your agenda. I apologize for that. I didn’t mean any disrespect when I did it,’” she said. “Then it would have just been the end of that.”
Listen to Keyshia Cole’s exchange with Ari Lennox below:
