On Thursday afternoon, when Tory Lanez tweeted that he would be breaking his silence over his alleged shooting of Megan Thee Stallion, the assumption was that he would go on Instagram live, just like she did, and refute any wrongdoing. But it turns out he decided to be an even bigger dickhead and drop a 17-track surprise album titled Daystar, wherein he denies having shot Megan and goes so far as to paint her as the bad guy in the situation. Just so we’re all on the same page, Tory Lanez decided to waste 17 tracks worth of everyone’s time besmirching the image and reputation of a successful Black woman who just two months ago was a victim of gun violence. And he’s doing it for a profit.
Megan accused Lanez of shooting her in the foot in August after Lanez had been arrested for carrying a concealed weapon. The two were leaving a party at Kylie Jenner’s house when the arrest took place. Megan initially said she had injured her foot on glass and retracted that statement afterward, claiming she didn’t want to implicate Lanez over fears of police violence. Prior to that, she also claimed that Lanez’s PR team was trying to minimize the mess by putting stories out that claimed Megan had been abusive toward Lanez, and he was simply a bystander.
Daystar is more than Lanez’s version of events: It’s an airing of grievances for all the ways in which he feels he’s been wronged by Megan alleging he was the shooter. As Lanez points out in one track, “What is Kulture,” he “ain’t been convicted of shit.” But as we’ve seen time and time again, lack of conviction doesn’t necessarily mean much—it’s a byproduct of the same judicial system that includes the police force Megan sought to protect him from. Lanez also laments over his soiled reputation, saying in the same song, “I refuse to be the poster boy for Black women I’m protecting / My momma Black, my sister Black, my baby momma Black / So how the fuck I’m unaffected? / Black women fueled my career for years, so don’t make me some type of tier of unperfection.”
Lanez makes it clear he wants to be perceived as an upstanding man who would never harm a woman, and by telling her version of events, Megan has ruined that image. Yet through claims of love for Megan and claims of protecting all Black women overall because he is a father and a devoted son, Lanez himself tears away at that protection verse by verse. This has nothing to do with protection and everything to do with ego, and in the process, he is inflicting more abuse onto Megan, who had to endure months of people mocking her and disbelieving her story on social media. It was an example of the way Black women are systematically disbelieved by police officers, doctors, non-Black women of color, and Black men on a daily basis—even if they’re celebrities. Lanez is playing on this universal fact by slamming Megan and her story for over an hour, even though she stopped talking about the issue once she dropped her Instagram story on August 20th. It only takes a single voice of doubt to take Megan from gun violence victim to “lying bitch” and, a little over a month after Megan spoke openly about the incident, Lanez has taken it upon himself to lead the choir. “How the fuck you get shot in your foot, don’t hit no bones or tendons,” Lanez asks on Money Over Fallouts, a track that samples a clip of Megan’s Instagram accusation.
When Lanez is not busy making Megan out to be a liar, he is attempting to garner sympathy for himself with lines like, “Look at how you doing me,” and “Megan people trying to frame me for a shooting but them boys ain’t cleaning up.” If that isn’t enough to garner people’s attention, Lanez also feigns an apology for behavior that was not allegedly shooting Megan in the foot: “Sorry for the times my attitude mixed with the status too.” But that line is prefaced with, surprise, another layer of excuses: “There’s traumas in my past that make me talk loud and lash at you.”
But even though he is hellbent on proving a point, Lanez can’t help but be a petty fuckboy on the album as well, putting it on the record that he is not 5' 3" but 5' 7". Not that it matters, because if all he’s got is an extra four inches, then he’s got nothing. Aside from height correction, Lanez also takes a shot at singer Jojo, who removed him from the deluxe version of her album following news of the alleged shooting. In Kanye-esque fashion, Lanez gives himself credit for Jojo’s current success.
It seems everyone is to blame but Lanez himself. While the deflection of blame isn’t a surprise, the extent to which Lanez goes to paint himself as an innocent victim rather than a garden-variety asshole is vomit-inducing at best, defenestration-worthy at worst.