It's unlikely that anyone expected B.o.B. and Neil DeGrasse Tyson to be going head to head in 2016. After the rapper shared a stream of tweets insisting that the earth is flat—"A lot of people are turned off by the phrase 'flat earth'... but there's no way u can see all the evidence and not know"—Tyson responded yesterday with a pithy dismissal: "Being five centuries regressed in your reasoning doesn’t mean we all can’t still like your music."
B.o.B. has now called the physicist out in a track called "Flatline." Freethinking got the world at my neck, he raps. Neil Tyson gotta loosen up his vest/ They probly write that man one hell of a check/ I'm over here on this side of town/ Come on over over over over here and try to clown/ I will never pipe down.
Other key lines include: Use your common sense, why is NASA part of the Department of Defense, and Indoctrinated in a cult called science/ And graduated to a club full of liars/ Heliocentrism... fuck you and your team, you can sit on the bench with 'em.
Presumably Tyson is working on a response at this very moment.
Update, 1/26/2016, 4:40 p.m.: Tyson tweeted a link to a B.o.B. diss track.
Tyson has responded to B.o.B.'s "Flatline" with a song of his own—kind of. "As an astrophysicist, I don't rap, but I know people who do," he wrote on Twitter. Then he shared "Flat To Fact," which borrows the instrumental from Drake's "Back To Back" and features rapping from Tyson's nephew.
Listen below.
