Flatline: How B.O.B killed his career with a flat earth freakout
Criminally, despite fronting one of the biggest rock bands of the last 20 years, Paramore singer Hayley Williams’ biggest hit on the pop charts is still her collaboration with pop-rapper B.O.B on ‘Airplanes’.
This isn’t a crime because the song’s a complete embarrassment, though its charms are based on your ability to put up with a metric shit-ton of schmaltz. No, such is the case with the vast majority of Hayley Williams’ recording career; it’s her collaborators that are the problem. In this case, it’s B.O.B that makes this an issue. Despite the fact that, at the time, it was an incredibly savvy move. One that saw the flame-haired frontwoman team up with a chart-topper who had a fair claim to being one of the best-selling rappers in the game.
In 2010, B.O.B (Bobby Ray Simmons Jr. to his mum) had come hurtling out of nowhere with the hit song ‘Nothin’ On You’, the song that also gave the world Bruno Mars. ‘Airplanes’ capitalised on this momentum and for a few years, B.O.B was a certified hitmaker. This would not last, however, and by the mid-2010s, his career was in something of a rut. Coincidentally, this was when he started saying some very stupid things on Twitter.
Remember when artists ran their own Twitter accounts? Yeah, it’s incidents like this that put a stop to that pretty fucking quickly. In January 2016, B.O.B started posting photos of the Earth and saying that it was flat. What’s more, he was completely serious about this, doubling down in a way that was hilarious at first, but became disturbing real quick. Was this a convincing troll job? Or, was he doing a Kanye before Kanye? Seemingly, the truth was even more depressing than either of those options.
Did he genuinely believe the earth was flat?
What happened after B.O.B said the earth is flat?
It really did seem like he was doubling down on a deeply held belief. Not just because he was saying demonstrably untrue things like “the earth is flat” and “no matter how high in elevation you are… the horizon is always eye level” either. He was also talking like a dyed-in-the-wool conspiracy theorist. It wasn’t just that he thought he was right, he was convinced that everyone who thought differently was in on the conspiracy.
The rapper was telling people that he was “going up against the greatest liars in history” and that we’ve “all been tremendously deceived”. He even added that old chestnut that we should do our own research and “make up our own minds”. That’s when Neil deGrasse Tyson waded in, firstly by explaining calmly on Twitter where B.O.B was mistaken in his scientific research. Thing is, that doesn’t work on people who’ve fallen for conspiracy theories. It’s the reason why the “do your own research” stuff is such a platitude.
When you’re locked into a conspiracy, all the stuff that disproves it is part of the conspiracy theory. When they tell you to “do your own research” what they’re really telling you is “find the shite I believe, then believe that”. Few things prove this more elegantly than Tyson taking apart B.O.B’s theories with calm and with empathy, and B.O.B responding with a diss track aimed at the celebrity astrophysicist. It’s called ‘Flatline’. It’s one of the worst things I’ve ever heard.
That was the moment that things got truly farcical. Tyson teamed up with his nephew to release his own response track, ‘Flat to Facts’. With ‘Flatline’, B.O.B didn’t even care enough to make its anti-semitism a dog whistle. This checks out; all conspiracy theories eventually lead to anti-semitism without fail. In true conspiracy theorist fashion, B.O.B didn’t even bother to admit defeat, joining the Flat Earth Society in the same year and a decade later, is still completely immovable in his belief that the Earth is flat.
Not only that, he’s now a decade deep in all the other wonders of the conspiracy theory world. After all, once you believe in one, pretty soon you believe in all of them. At the expense of every good thing in your life.