Brooklyn-based rapper Joey Bada$$ proved his anti-authoritarian bona fides on Monday, when he ignored legions of warnings against viewing the total solar eclipse without special glasses and stared at the cosmic ballet with his bare eyes anyway. Bada$$’ Twitter and Instagram accounts tell two different versions of the event, as he posted a picture of himself chilling out wearing eclipse glasses on Instagram but claimed in a series of tweets that he was having vision problems after watching it without glasses on:
He canceled tour dates in Toronto, Cleveland, and Chicago shortly after, citing “unforseen circumstances” (good one, Joey) and implying that he had indeed sustained some sort of injury while defying the medical establishment with his naked retinas. That implication seems to have been confirmed shortly afterwards on his Instagram:
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Speaking to NPR, optometry professor Ralph Chou says that if one were to have sustained eye damage during the eclipse, symptoms can take 12 hours to appear and include blurred vision and seeing spots. “The very center of the vision might have a spot, or multiple spots, that were missing in their vision—that were very, very blurred,” he says. Chou adds that about half the time, this vision loss is permanent; otherwise, it’ll go away within a few months to a year.
Of course, Bada$$ might just be having a bit of fun with all of us. His ability to tweet is certainly unaffected:
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