Is Joe Budden back on drugs?

Prayers up for a hip-hop media legend

The Joe Budden Podcast is where I get my information from. I can’t afford to lose it to substance abuse.

Much as I’d like to believe him, I’m concerned that a recent incident in which host Joe Budden is alleged to have exposed himself to two white children wasn’t just a matter of him sleepwalking.

Most people, when they’re sleepwalking, make themselves a ham sandwich and a glass of milk and then go back to bed. Why would Budden demand entry to the unit across the hall, with no clothes on, unless… I don’t even want to think about it!

It might actually be for the best that Joe Budden has a history of substance abuse dating back to his youth, including stints in rehab facilities. As Samuel L. Jackson in the movie True Romance once famously explained, drugs will have you doing all kinds of crazy shit.

For whatever reason, PCP makes you want to strip naked in public. And possibly also at home, but who gives a shit what you do in the comfort of your own home? If you see a crazy person wandering the streets of a bad neighborhood with no clothes on, it’s probably PCP.

The only way to say for certain would be to test to see if they have superhuman strength, like, if they could pick up a car, or if the police tried to taser them and it didn’t work.

Could Joe Budden have been on PCP when he was recorded on a Ring camera banging on his neighbors’ door and attempting to enter a code on their keypad? It might be in his best interest to say that he was even if he wasn’t.

One of the neighbors said that she and her two minor daughters all saw it, and by “it” I mean Budden’s schlong (nullus), when they received alerts on their phones from the doorbell camera. I’m sure the daughters were traumatized, and I’d be curious to see who they end up with later in life.

I wonder if this was posted to Nextdoor. If only anyone who would be reading this could afford to live in that area. Here in the shantytown, people post doorbell camera footage all the time, but it’s usually just local underprivileged youth checking to see if people locked their car doors or doing their Christmas shopping on people’s front porches.

A few weeks ago, Joe Budden randomly disappeared from his own podcast. His co-hosts clearly had no idea where he was. Because he’s a middle-aged black man at a time when average life expectancy can’t be any more than about 58, I figured it might be a health issue—maybe something weird, like that condition where your balls get really big if you eat fried foods. Elephantitis of the Nuts. I wouldn’t want anyone to know about that either.

He was gone for a good three or four episodes. When he came back, he did say that he was having an issue with sleepwalking, but he didn’t say anything about having exposed himself to eight-year-olds, dude, as if he were Jesus Quintana, or that, as a result, he might have to go door-to-door and explain his legal situation. Recording in Parks’ basement was said to be a matter of the building he was living in not allowing people to record podcasts, which, why did I buy that for so much as a minute?

Where else would one record a podcast? Why would he move from the place where he was living just because he’s not allowed to record podcasts there anymore? The people in the unit across the hall must have a restraining order against him. They can’t afford to have their daughters see that again. It remains to be seen what effect, if any, seeing it once will have on them. If they start pulling up ‘90s-era R&B on the family Spotify account, we’ll know it’s all over and done with.

In a statement released by the police department investigating this matter, they were careful to note that Joe Budden has yet to be convicted of a crime. Remember when the Pee Tape dropped, and they thought that might be Arruh’s brother? Maybe this was the same guy. I’m holding out hope that Budden comes up with some sort of explanation, if only for the sake of music journalism.