The hip-hop world was jolted into a state of raw disbelief late Thursday as a leaked snippet from NBA YoungBoy’s upcoming music crossed what many consider an unforgivable line, targeting the deceased son of podcast icon and Philadelphia legend Gillie Da Kid. The bar, which surfaced on social media platforms around 8 p. m
EST, directly referenced the 2023 murder of Gillie’s son, Devin “YNG Cheese” Spady, framing the tragedy as a failure of manhood. Within hours, the snippet had been shared tens of thousands of times, sparking a firestorm of condemnation from fans, fellow artists, and commentators who universally agreed that the culture’s sacred boundary—never weaponize a parent’s grief—had been shattered.
NBA YoungBoy, born Kentrell Gaulden, is just days away from his scheduled release from federal custody on July 27. Instead of staying quiet in that final stretch, the rapper has unleashed a torrent of diss tracks targeting Future, Doe Boy, Offset, and the entire Atlanta scene. But the shot at Gillie stands apart for its sheer brutality.
The offending line, captured in an unreleased snippet that began circulating on July 14, alleged that Gillie “ain’t kill nothing” in response to his son’s murder. That accusation struck a nerve because Gillie’s son, Cheese, was gunned down at age 25 in North Philadelphia on July 20, 2023, in a triple shooting that remains unsolved. The murder devastated Gillie, who has since spoken openly on the Pivot Podcast about the unbearable moment he had to wash his son’s body at the funeral home—an experience he described as the worst and best moment of his life, one that he said made him a true man.
Gillie Da Kid, whose real name is Nasir Fard, has spent the two years since Cheese’s death channeling his pain into community work and his wildly popular podcast Million Dollaz Worth of Game, co-hosted with his cousin Wallo. The show has become a platform for mentorship and raw honesty, pulling in guests like Shaquille O’Neal and Kevin Hart. In December 2023, Gillie and Wallo actually traveled to YoungBoy’s Wyoming house arrest compound to record an intimate episode that was released on Christmas Day.
That interview, which showed Gillie engaging YoungBoy with respect and curiosity, seemed to build a bridge between the two worlds. But behind the scenes, tensions simmered. A YoungBoy associate named Herm the Black Sheep later claimed the interview had not been properly approved, and he took a thinly veiled shot at Gillie’s authenticity—suggesting Gillie was quick to bring “gangster energy” to YoungBoy but slow to direct that same energy toward those who actually killed his son.
That 2023 Instagram post now reads as a roadmap to the current explosion. When YoungBoy’s snippet landed, the entire hip-hop ecosystem reacted with a collective gasp. All HipHop, HotNewHipHop, and My Mixtapez all reported the story within hours, emphasizing that the diss was “extremely unfortunate” and that “disrespecting the dead is a line you simply do not cross.”
Even YoungBoy’s most ardent defenders struggled to justify the attack. The rapper, after all, is a father himself with multiple children scattered across his life; his own music often dwells on his fear of leaving them fatherless. The cognitive dissonance between that vulnerable side and the cold, calculated cruelty of the Cheese reference left fans uneasy.
Gillie’s response, delivered in a live stream on July 15, was anything but the fiery retaliation the culture might have expected. He did not scream threats or promise revenge. Instead, he rapped a few bars from Lil Durk’s “I Ha,” a song deeply rooted in grief and street loyalty, and then spoke with a chilling calm that seemed to amplify his authority.
“I don’t take it no type of way,” he said, sniffling slightly. “You can’t make me feel no type of way mentioning my son. I already come to grips with what happened.”
He then dropped a staggering detail: his youngest living child is older than NBA YoungBoy. That generational gap—Gillie in his 40s, YoungBoy just 26—underscored the sheer imbalance of experience between them. “Old-school men don’t announce what they’re gonna do on the internet,” Gillie added, a line that immediately went viral.
The implication was clear: whatever comes next, it will not be broadcast.
The silence that followed Gillie’s stream spoke volumes. He has not extended the news cycle with diss tracks or lengthy tirades. That restraint has become the most talked-about element of the entire incident.
By refusing to feed the drama, Gillie has positioned himself as a man who has already walked through the deepest valley of grief and emerged with a calm that no bar from a rapper half his age can disturb. Meanwhile, the question of why YoungBoy targeted Gillie at all remains unanswered. There was no public beef, no prior insult exchanged.
The Wyoming interview had been warm and respectful. Some speculate that Herm the Black Sheep’s old complaint planted a seed of resentment in YoungBoy’s camp. Others believe YoungBoy simply saw Gillie as an easy target during his scorched-earth campaign and didn’t expect the blowback.
None of those theories hold water next to the fact that Cheese’s murder was one of the most heavily mourned losses in recent Philadelphia hip-hop history.
Cheese was more than a statistic. He was a 25-year-old father to a toddler, an aspiring rapper who collaborated with his brother Mac under the name Mac and Cheese, and the son of a man who had dedicated his podcast to steering young Black men away from the very violence that took him. On July 20, 2023, around 8:24 p.
m. , Cheese was shot once in the back near Mascher Street and Nedro Avenue in Philadelphia’s Olney section. Ten shell casings were recovered.
Two other victims survived. No arrests were ever made. Meek Mill, who grew up in the same North Philadelphia streets, was one of the first to post his grief, writing that it was “so hard to survive in Philadelphia.”
Two years later, in 2025, Meek gifted Gillie a custom iced-out pendant of Cheese’s portrait—a moment that brought Gillie to tears. The image of that embrace, shared on social media, became a symbol of how the community wraps around its own in times of unspeakable loss.
YoungBoy’s reference to that father’s grief, on the cusp of his own freedom, has forced the culture to confront an uncomfortable question: Where is the line? Rap has always thrived on confrontation, from the Bridge Wars to the Nas-Jay-Z feud. But even in that tradition, there has been an unwritten rule that children are off-limits.
Jay-Z’s “Takeover” line about Nas’s daughter haunted him for years. Pusha T’s “The Story of Adidon” weaponized Drake’s hidden son and split the culture down the middle. Those incidents sparked debates that still linger.
This one, however, feels different. Cheese was not a secret or a rumor. He was a publicly mourned young man whose father had broken down in tears describing washing his body.
To use that as ammunition is not competition—it is, in the eyes of many, an act of cowardice.
The speed of this story—dissenting at 8 p. m. , Gillie’s response by the next afternoon—underscores how social media has compressed hip-hop controversy into a matter of hours.
There is no time for private mediation or cooling-off. The court of public opinion decides, and in this case, the verdict was swift and lopsided. Even fans who had been entertained by YoungBoy’s rampage through the Atlanta rap scene drew a hard line here.
“This is not a bar, this is something else,” one viral tweet read. “Gillie is a man who buried his child. You can’t punch up at that.”
Now the world waits for July 27. YoungBoy is scheduled to walk free, ending a long legal odyssey of house arrest, federal gun charges, and prescription fraud. His release was supposed to be a celebration of survival and second chances.
Instead, the conversation is dominated by whether his first act as a free man will involve accountability for the grief he just reawakened. Gillie, meanwhile, has returned to the measured tone that has defined his post-grief life. In his live stream, he quoted no names, made no explicit threats.
He simply reminded everyone that real men don’t announce their next moves on the internet.
This story is still unfolding. But one thing is already clear: in a genre that prides itself on authenticity and street credibility, nothing strips a man of his armor quite like having his son turned into a punchline. Gillie Da Kid has been through hell and rebuilt himself.
Whether NBA YoungBoy—days from freedom, carrying the weight of his own children and his own trauma—can navigate the fallout of his own words will define the next chapter of his career. The culture is watching, and it is not blinking.
