The Grammys are still a focus due to Beyoncé’s historic moment, but Melii is facing off with the BeyHive. Last night, Beyoncé became the most-awarded artist in Grammy history. Although Renaissance missed out on Album of the Year—Harry Styles took the title—the project still earned the singer several accolades. On Twitter, Melii fired off a tweet many attributed to the megastar. She didn’t name names, but people believed she was shading Bey.
Renaissance was an ode to queer artists who pioneered Electronic, House, and Dance music. Many of the songs sampled those icons, and it was hailed as an ode to the LGBTQIA+ community. “A lot of ppl careers were dead and they later used the lgbtq community to revive it and y’all ate that up,” Melii tweeted.
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA FEBRUARY 5: Beyonce accepts the Best Dance/Electronic Music Album award for Renaissance onstage during the 65th GRAMMY Awards at Crypto.com Arena on February 05, 2023 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
The backlash was swift, as people accused Melii of shading the singer for producing an album highlighting the marginalized community. The Neighborhood Talk shared Melii’s tweet, and their comment section lit up, causing her to step in to react. “Nah … ok boom ya don’t gotta like me but never will I ever disrespect THE QUEEN,” Melii explained. Beyoncé supported my ‘ non existent career ‘ like ya sayin in the comments along with riri, lil Wayne n bunch of greats.”
“Any way back to this since I’m so trash n a nobody,” she continued. “I WILL NEVER DISRESPECT BEYONCÉ SHE IS SOMEONE I LOOK UP TO N I WILL FOREVER BE GRATEFUL THAT SHE USED MY SONG FOR BRAND . Ya don’t need to like me … CUZ I UNDERSTAND I SAY ALOT OF SH*T OTHERS WONT BUT PLEASE HOLD BACK ON THE FALSE NARRATIVE.”
Beyoncé took home her 32nd Grammy win last night and delivered a touching acceptance speech. “I want to thank god for protecting me,” she said. “Thank you, god. I’d like to thank my uncle Johnny, who’s not here, but he’s here in spirit. I’d like to thank my parents—my father, my mother—for loving me and pushing me.”
“I’d like to thank my beautiful husband, my beautiful three children, who are at home watching,” she added. “I’d like to thank the queer community for your love and for inventing the genre. God bless you. Thank you so much to the Grammys.” Her wins last night include Best R&B song for “Cuff It,” Best Dance/Electronic Album, Best Dance/Electronic Recording for “Break My Soul,” and Best Traditional R&B Performance for “Plastic Off the Sofa.”
Watch Beyoncé’s speech below and read more from Melii.
GOD PROTECT ME FROM THESE MISERABLE SOULS AND THEIR TONGUES. I PRAY YOU GIVE THEM THE SAME PEACE YOU GAVE ME I PRAY YOU FILL THEM W JOY AND WHOLENESS.
I SEND love to everyone who I have offended or heartstrings I tugged at, I pray God sends y’all the same peace he has blessed me with and the same resilience.pray that nothing others say moves or triggers u & that this years only positivity, honesty & love flows thru ur energypic.twitter.com/mSOY6KjXtU
Oh wait … never did ya think I referred to Beyoncé ? Are ya dumb ? U mean the lady who used my song to promote her brand . The reach was crazy … I’d never disrespect Beyoncé. Ya don’t gotta like me but to just lie n try find a reason to be mad is ridiculous.
While it’s impossible to fit every hip-hop icon into one performance for its 50th anniversary, some omissions feel easily avoidable. Willie D just called out the Grammys for inviting Scarface to perform, but not the rest of the Geto Boys. Moreover, Scarface delivered his verse on the 1991 classic “Mind Playing Tricks On Me.” The fantastic homage at the 65th annual Grammy Awards in Los Angeles’ Crypto.com Arena on Sunday (February 5). Also, the near-14-minute show included many legends, from Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five to Nelly and even Lil Baby. However, when Scarface delivered the medley’s first Southern staple, his fellow Geto Boy Willie D was nowhere to be seen.
ST. LOUIS – OCTOBER 1991: Rappers Willie D. (William James Dennis) and Scarface (Brad Terrence Jordan) of The Geto Boys performs at The Arena in St. Louis, Missouri in October 1991. (Photo By Raymond Boyd/Getty Images)
Afterwards, Willie took to Instagram to express his frustrations. Moreover, he’s the only other living member of the Houston group, as Bushwick Bill passed away in June of 2019. “A reminder to the Grammys and all the rest of y’all out there trying to hustle the Geto Boys brand by only including Scarface, who had a stellar solo career: How in the hell are you gonna have a 50-year tribute to Hip Hop and not include Geto Boys the group?” Willie asked. “If you forgot, the group includes Scarface and Willie D. How you gonna use a performance that includes a song that I co-wrote but not even have the decency, the respect to reach out to me and ask me if I wanted to participate? Y’all are some clowns for that. All the way out of pocket. Whoever made the call, y’all some clowns… No more talking.”
Also, he captioned his post with ““Disrespectful Mofos!!! No mo’ talk.” In fact, some people even questioned why Scarface himself didn’t give him a call or decline performing without him. Still, Questlove clearly curated this spectacle with a lot of heart and passion. With that in mind, we don’t know who was directly responsible for this specific decision. Regardless, the Roots drummer partnered with Nas’s Mass Appeal to bring hip-hop’s fifty years to life. “Hip Hop has been a driving force in the music and the culture,” he expressed. “It’s had an immeasurable impact on our culture and our world and I’ve had the great privilege of co-curating this thing with the Roots and many others that are gonna join us that night.”
How did they leave my man Willie D off the 50th anniversary of Hip Hop? Geto Boys #GRAMMYs HTOWN legend…
Meanwhile, LL Cool J finished the performance with a hopeful gaze towards the future, and by acknowledging the long journey. “From The Bronx to the five boroughs, to the West Coast to the Heartland; overseas to Europe, to Africa, to Asia; TikTok, whatever’s next,” he said. “Because thanks to the 33 Hip Hop artists on stage and the countless more we love, Hip Hop is a global platform today. We’re celebrating. Happy 50th anniversary to Hip Hop, baby!” Come back to HNHH for the latest news on the Grammys, hip-hop history, and underrepresented legends.
Well, I regret to report that the Grammys, despite staging a celebration of 50 years of hip-hop history (supposedly), still can’t seem to get hip-hop right despite all the ways the world makes it easy these days. And we’ll get to that performance in a minute, but first, let me dust off the drum I’ve been banging for the past six years to once again call out the rap establishment for either overlooking or downplaying the contributions and accomplishments of women in hip-hop for, well, the past 50 years.
From the obvious, like omitting Gangsta Boo from the In Memoriam segment to the subtle, like the vague respectability politics displayed by which female stars’ songs didn’t make it into the 10-minute-long tribute, the Recording Academy members’ biases were evident throughout the rap-focused portions of the ceremony.
Now, hip-hop doesn’t need and has never needed the Grammys’ approval or acknowledgment. But the Grammys have been striving for more relevance through engagement with hip-hop and to continue to do so on a purely surface level after all this time despite being called out repeatedly over the past decade isn’t going to get them there.
Make no mistake; that engagement is definitely surface-level. I’m not arguing that the Grammys should be honoring the most underground rappers… We don’t need Griselda menacing the crowd or a full slate of Memphis trap rappers dominating the nominations. But look, when one of the very pioneers of Memphis trap rap passes away a month before the ceremony, it makes very little sense for her name to be omitted from the In Memoriam segment (this isn’t the first time this has happened, either).
But let’s stick a pin in that thought because it’s going to tie into some of my points about the 50 Years of Hip-Hop tribute performance. Judging from that performance, the Grammys have also taken what feels like a reductive outlook on hip-hop in general. Check out the list of songs that supposedly represent 50 years of hip-hop history.
It looks a lot more like something that would have been done in 2003 than in 2023, doesn’t it? How else can you explain that 15 of the 23 songs were from before the year 2000 and only six of those were from between 1990 and 2000? The jump from The Lox to Lil Baby was called jarring on Twitter but even more than that, it belies the Grammys’ commitment to honoring younger, more diverse artists.
Sure, the logistics of pulling together something like that performance are likely Herculean, but do you truly mean to tell me that Soulja Boy was doing something more important than the Grammys on Sunday night? What about Chief Keef? Future was in the room, awaiting his eventual disappointment as the rightful Rap Album Of The Year winner, they couldn’t ask him to do “Turn On The Lights” or “March Madness?”
I could expend at least a couple more paragraphs on just the missing 2010s. It appears the Grammys’ current contingent of hip-hop representatives – to be sure, a crowd of Gen-Xers who all remember “Rapper’s Delight” coming on the radio in 1979 but who couldn’t name a recent Young Thug song to save their lives – are more than content to let that decade fall by the wayside while paying lip service to the last year or so of contemporary hits.
I certainly understand the compulsion, I really do. For literal decades, not just one, but two generations who grew up on rap watched those old-school pioneers of the ‘80s get overlooked or ignored – hello, the first untelevised Rap Grammy in 1989 – so it makes sense they’d want to give themselves these flowers now.
But they shouldn’t come at the cost of throwing their successors under the bus. That only starts a cycle that is self-destructive and counterintuitive – although it is also, to be fair, instructive of the way the Grammys works in the first place (see: Bonnie Raitt winning Song of the Year for a song literally no one listened to). And it’s a modus operandi that first and second-generation hip-hop stars have been employing for far too long, dumping on ‘90s and 2000s kids because they don’t like the greater emphasis on melody and trap aesthetics.
It’s also telling that the only women included were the upright-seeming, “wholesome” ones. Salt-N-Pepa may have been sex-forward and unapologetic for their time, but compared to Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion, they are downright tame. Queen Latifah and Missy Elliott – who are among my personal favorites, and are indisputable legends – are also the most often pitted against contemporary faves like Nicki Minaj as the role models for girls to look up to.
Even Lil Kim and Foxy Brown, largely credited as the godmothers of modern “pussy rap” – the subgenre of hip-hop that women are mostly allowed to dominate – were absent from the celebration, giving the impression that the history of hip-hop is being sanitized as the disruptors of yesteryear age into the conservative parental figures youth movements are designed to rebel against.
Rap music is the most popular genre in the world. Hip-hop culture has permeated every corner of the globe. It’s done so largely by the efforts of the members of the Recording Academy who helped push rap forward. But now that they’ve done so, they seem intent on holding it back.
From predictably awarding Kendrick Lamar Rap Album Of The Year, seemingly for breaking with the conventions of the genre rather than embracing them, to overlooking so many contemporary rap heroes to trying to shrink and demean women in hip-hop, it seems the Recording Academy has had a bad influence on its rap delegation. They seem to be trying to conform rather than shake things up – and that’s not hip-hop.
No institution can ever be perfect or get everything right, but it’s clear that whatever measures the Grammys have supposedly taken to balance things out aren’t working. Perhaps more transparency is needed – I’d love to see how the ranked voting results are actually shaking out, personally – or maybe more expansion and a larger youth contingent are needed to ensure that more options appear on the ballot. One way or another, the Grammys have to do better, or else why even bother with hip-hop honors in the first place?
Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
Last night, fans were stunned when the Grammys announced the Album Of The Year winner. While many expected that the win would go to Beyoncé for her groundbreaking album Renaissance, the award was instead given to Harry Styles for Harry’s House. Twitter erupted with fury, with many calling it an outright robbery, but there’s one person who’s not sweating it — arguably the second most invested party, Beyoncé’s husband Jay-Z.
In an interview with Tidal (a friendly outlet if there ever was one) ahead of the ceremony, Jay explained that he takes a different perspective on the importance of the award show, rather than getting his hopes up. “I remove myself from the process and hope they just get it right,” he said. “It got to the point where I was like, it’s just a marketing thing. You go, you got an album out and it could help the sales go up.”
Jay also explained why he thought Renaissance deserved the award, while admitting his bias. “Look what it’s done to the culture,” he observed. “Look how the energy of the world moved. They play her whole album in the club. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen that. The whole entire joint — like, everything?! Every remix is amazing. Everyone’s inspired. It has inspired the world. Every remix is better than the other one. From anybody, we’re just finding these joints out in the street… It’s inspiring creativity. You know how The Black Album had The Grey Album [Danger Mouse’s 2004 mashup project]? And the one with Radiohead? It was called Jaydiohead [Minty Fresh Beats’ 2009 mashup]. When it just inspires creativity, that’s an album. That has to be Album Of The Year. It has to be.”
Unfortunately, it seems the Recording Academy, by and large, disagreed (for what it’s worth, most of them are way too old for “the club” by now, right?). We’ll see how it does affect Beyoncé’s (and Styles’) sales in the future or their award show strategies, but with her world tour in front of her, Beyoncé has bigger fish to fry.
The confusion over Raitt winning out over monster songs by Adele, Beyoncé, DJ Khaled, Gayle, Styles, Kendrick Lamar, Lizzo, Steve Lacy, and Taylor Swift led to some tweeters differentiating between Song Of The Year and Record Of The Year.
BTW.. Song of the Year is about writing and composition.
Record of the Year is about the recording itself (singing, producer, engineering).
But the official website for the Grammys offered an explainer in December 2017. To sum it up, Record Of The Year “goes to the artist(s), producer(s), and engineer(s) involved in crafting the specific recording (hence ‘record’) of a song,” and Song Of The Year “goes to the songwriter(s) (hence ‘song’) of new material (not including sampled or interpolated material) of a song.”
Raitt won Song Of The Year for “Just Like That,” which she produced and wrote herself. Lizzo shared her “About Damn Time” Record Of The Year victory with producers Ricky Reed and Blake Slatkin, engineers/mixers Patrick Kehrier, Bill Malina, and Manny Marroquin, and mastering engineer Emerson Mancini.
Let’s not waste time, here: the Grammys let us all down by failing to acknowledge Beyoncé’s Renaissance as the Album Of The Year, in favor of the audio equivalent of plain oatmeal. I’m sure Harry Styles is a very nice British boy – distinctive lack of personality aside – but I, and indeed, many, many others fail to see what his album accomplished that Beyoncé’s did not.
Where Styles’ album was a fine example of a middle-of-the-road pop album, taking inspiration from the past 40 years or so of Top 40 radio (I’m putting it nicely – others have argued that it was pale imitation), Renaissance excavated 40 years of Black music history. Beyoncé sought to shine a spotlight on an oft-and-long-overlooked subculture of Black joy and rebellion.
And while the Grammys were certainly happy to make a fuss about her setting the record for most-awarded act ever, shutting her out from Album Of The Year – again – felt like a repudiation, a rejection, of not just Beyoncé’s efforts, but of the validity of the lived experience of the people her album highlighted. It’s a slap in the face.
To add insult to injury, these are the people and this is the scene that has most directly influenced pop music over the past 40 years. All of your faves? They got their swag from queer Black folks. If you ask just about any dance-pop star with a Billboard Hot 100 hit who they were inspired by, you’re going to get the same answers: Britney Spears, Madonna. Well, who inspired Madonna? I’ll wait.
Actually, no I won’t. It was that New York rave culture, where queer Black folks pioneered house and techno, ball culture, and the sampling techniques that permeate modern music today. Look at Sam Smith and Kim Petras winning Best Pop Duo/Group Performance last night. That doesn’t happen without the queer Black community opening the door, at the roots of things, laying the foundation for the branches to flourish.
And Beyoncé, who brought that underground movement to the daylight, went out of her way to acknowledge those contributors to the culture. She put Grace Jones on the album. She nodded to the dozens of collaborators and inspirations for that album in both the liner notes and on her website. As my colleague, Alex Gonzalez, pointed out on Twitter, “Both Harry and Beyoncé noticeably took inspiration from LGBTQ+ aesthetics and culture for their respective album eras… but only one of them actually thanked the queer community.”
And musically, she embraced the breadth and range of those contributions, from disco to neo-soul and everything in between. She displayed versatility and depth and grace and vulnerability and gratitude. She, to quote the kids (who are, again, only quoting Black drag queens), ate and left no crumbs.
Harry’s acceptance speech, oddly enough, inadvertently highlighted just how insultingly tone-deaf this pick really was. “This never happens to people like me,” he said. People like who, Harry? British people? Paul McCartney, Sting, and Adele all have several. Guys who were hand-picked and groomed by some of the biggest producers on the planet to be pop stars from their teens? Hey, have you ever heard of Justin Timberlake?
There is literally no category or tag that you could place on Harry Styles that would put him at a disadvantage in today’s society, let alone at an institution like the Recording Academy, which has had a 100-year history of dropping the ball on honoring Black artists, women, queer artists, or people of color in general at best, and outright racism at worst. Harry is, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, a straight, white, rich dude… the people modern society is set up to serve.
You can’t even blame this on the voting process; in a Variety feature about Academy voters, two anonymous members of this “prestigious” group openly admitted they didn’t vote for Beyoncé “because she always wins.” There was true spite behind this robbery, like the heist in Ocean’s Eleven. It wasn’t just about seeing Harry win – it was about seeing Beyoncé, a Black woman whose commitment to excellence in her craft oozes out of every fiber of her being, who has sacrificed so much to be the best at her craft, who shouldered the burden of representing an entire community in her work… lose.
That is truly heinous.
But, it’s also business as usual in America, where we Black folks are told we have to work twice as hard for half as much. If nothing else, last night’s Grammy result adds one more exhibit to the mountainous pile of evidence for this. It’s all just proof that the Grammys, like most everything else, ain’t really for us – and that’s a shame, because America, and its music, owe us so much.
The Grammys: They sure are long! Shout out to my fellow East Coasters who watched the 2023 Grammys until midnight yesterday and got 45 quality minutes of sleep before getting ready for work this morning.
Within all the length of last night’s show, a lot of things happened. Some awards went to their expected recipients, others went to nominees viewers probably forgot were even up for consideration. Some artists put on spectacular performances, others were certainly at least on stage performing music. Some people got their flowers, others would have settled for just a glimpse of a dried-out petal.
With the dust settling now, all of these events can be generally placed into three categories: winners, losers, and surprises. In fact, the highlights of these goings-on have been categorized thusly… by me… below.
Beyoncé took a slight L when she got stuck in traffic and consequently showed up late to the Grammys. That was profoundly overshadowed, though, by one of the biggest moments of Bey’s career: Renaissance won the Grammy for Best Dance/Electronic Music Album. In a vacuum, that’s kind of neat, but zoom out: That Grammy was the 32nd of Beyoncé’s career, which is the new all-time Grammy record. The ever-composed Beyoncé was clearly emotional while accepting the award, which goes to show how major the win was not just in music history, but to her personally.
Surprise: Bonnie Raitt/Samara Joy
Bonnie Raitt’s reaction to winning Song of the Year is everyone’s reaction to her winning Song of the Year #Grammyspic.twitter.com/HYcMZK00hc
Beyoncé’s big win wasn’t a shock. You know what was, though? Half of the Grammys in the “big four” categories.
The Best New Artist field was strong and the winner ended up being Samara Joy, a jazz singer who’s a relative unknown when compared to competitors like Anitta, Latto, and Wet Leg.
Then came Song Of The Year.
Up for consideration were songs by Adele, Beyoncé, Bonnie Raitt, DJ Khaled, Gayle, Harry Styles, Kendrick Lamar, Lizzo, Steve Lacy, and Taylor Swift. Looking at that list, clearly, there’s one artist that stands out, and not favorably in terms of contemporary acclaim and pop culture relevance: Raitt. Just like that, though, “Just Like That” won.
Raitt is a legend and a Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame inductee, but even she was left scratching her head: When her name was called, she gave an open-mouthed look around the room like she just won $100K on a gas station scratcher. That was a fair reaction: “Just Like That” currently has under half a million streams on Spotify. Last year, around 9.5 million people watched the Grammys. So, if those numbers remain similar for this year’s broadcast, that means about 20 times as many people watched “Just Like That” win the award than had actually heard the song before (and that’s being generous by assuming every Spotify listener has only played the song one time).
The Grammys aren’t supposed to be a popularity contest, but cultural relevance should have been a bigger consideration here.
Loser: In Memoriam segment
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Every year, the Recording Academy honors esteemed deceased musicians with its In Memoriam portion of the show. Also every year, they find a way to piss people off. Fans were quick to notice that artists like Gangsta Boo and Aaron Carter weren’t mentioned during the broadcast, which rubbed some viewers the wrong way.
To the Recording Academy’s credit, in a post shared ahead of the show, they shared an In Memoriam list featuring more names than made it onto the broadcast, noting that “some” of them would be included in the video tribute. Carter was on that list, but not the broadcast. They also note that the people on the list all died between January 1, 2022 and December 6, 2022; Boo died on January 1, 2023.
So, the Recording Academy technically has some plausible deniability here, but maybe policies that exclude people who should obviously be named could use some reconsidering.
Winner: Wet Leg
Wet Leg – Alternative Music Album, Alternative Music Performance
Previously, leg was dry. At the Grammys, though, leg was wet: Emerging rock favorites Wet Leg was up for five awards and they took home two of them: Best Alternative Music Performance for “Chaise Longue” and Best Alternative Music Album for Wet Leg.
Harry was one of the evening’s most-nominated artist with seven total nods. He ended the night with a strong winning percentage, too, taking home three awards, most notably picking up Album Of The Year for Harry’s House. That said…
…boy was his performance during the show dull and weird.
He started his rendition of “As It Was” with some backing dancers, all spinning slowly on a rotating platform, like the song’s music video. It was an extremely low-energy environment for a minute or so, all while the relentlessly upbeat song charged on in defiant tonal contrast. It looked as though Styles and company had the stage set up to perform an Adele ballad before switching to “As It Was” seconds before going on. Things didn’t really improve after the intro, either. Styles’ current tour has obviously gone well, as the banner he has hanging in Madison Square Garden indicates, but the watermelon sugar high appears to have worn off since his last arena show.
Winner: Viola Davis
Viola Davis has achieved EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony) status. “It has been such a journey, I just EGOT!” pic.twitter.com/YYj4MMJvRg
Congratulations are in order for Viola Davis: She e-got her EGOT! She’s now one of only 18 people to ever do it and it’s thanks in part to last night’s win in the Best Audio Book, Narration, And Storytelling Recording category, for her Finding Me memoir.
Beyoncé was the evening’s leading nominee with nine total nods, but Lamar was right behind her with eight of his own. Despite getting shut out of the main categories, Lamar did well in the hip-hop categories, winning in Best Rap Performance (“The Heart Part 5”), Best Rap Song (“The Heart Part 5”), and Best Rap Album (Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers). Furthermore, he did it all while dressed like Goodwill Kid, M.A.A.D. City.
In the Best R&B Song category, Beyoncé came out on top with “Cuff It.” Another Renaissance track, “Virgo’s Groove,” was up for Best R&B Performance, and while that may have felt like an obvious pick there, Muni Long actually pulled off the upset with “Hrs & Hrs.”
That’s not to say, of course, that Long’s win (her first Grammy victory) is inexcusable. “Hrs & Hrs” is an accomplished track, as it was only the second song by an independent artist to top the Billboard Hot R&B Songs chart, it’s certified platinum, and it achieved a No. 16 peak on the Hot 100. Beating Beyoncé for a Grammy is a tall mountain to scale, so congrats to Long!
Winner: 50th Anniversary Of Hip-Hop Tribute Performance
The Recording Academy put a major focus on honoring hip-hop in 2023, since this year marks the half-century anniversary of the genre’s inception. They went all out with a gargantuan 10-minute performance that spanned eras, featuring stage time from Grandmaster Flash, Rakim, RUN-DMC, Salt-N-Pepa, Future, GloRilla, Lil Baby, Busta Rhymes, De La Soul, Missy Elliott, Method Man, Nelly, and Too Short, among others. If you’re looking for a hip-hop history lesson, the setlist is a terrific starting point.
To her name, Brandi Carlile has racked up 24 Grammy nominations in her lifetime. She’s usually firmly in the Americana and country categories, but this year, she earned her first rock nominations. She actually dominated on that front, with “Broken Horses” winning Best Rock Song and Best Rock Performance. While on the surface, Carlile getting rock Grammys might read as off, she performed the track during the broadcast and it was very clearly a rock song, and a pretty good one, too.
Last night, a lot of songs did, but “God Did” was not among them. The DJ Khaled, Rick Ross, Lil Wayne, Jay-Z, John Legend, and Fridayy song was nominated for Song Of The Year, Best Rap Performance, and Best Rap Song. It won none of those awards.
Then, Khaled and company had to close the show with a performance of the song, which featured Khaled spouting his classic substance-free motivational nuggets. His loud claims of “we the best” or whatever while actual musicians were performing around him fell especially flat, since the Recording Academy just finished declaring on national television that he is in fact not the best.
Loser: Benny Blanco
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Benny Blanco wore that to the 2023 Grammy Awards.
Find the full list of this year’s Grammy nominees and winners here.
Hundreds of stars awed audiences at the 2023 Grammys, but some took it a step further and raised eyebrows with their looks. Moreover, some seemed to point at big news to share. For example, Yung Miami just stunned onlookers at the pre Grammys gala, boasting a white dress, fluffy pink sleeves, and a big diamond ring. Furthermore, readers may remember that bling from her birthday bash just a couple of days ago. While the Miami rapper can wear whatever impressive jewelry she wants, fans took the display as a hint at something more.
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – JANUARY 17: Yung Miami attends the Los Angeles Premiere of Netflix’s “You People” at Regency Village Theatre on January 17, 2023 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Robin L Marshall/WireImage)
As such, many on social media started to discuss whether the City Girl got engaged. Currently, a lot of the conversation surrounds her assumed booDiddy, yet their relationship is not particularly set in stone. Of course, both artists gushed about each other before, and their many outings together suggest something deeper. However, Yung Miami herself pushed back on some allegations surrounding her seemingly open relationship with Diddy. For example, she tweeted a seemingly pointed message after the Bad Boy exec announced the birth of his seven child Love. “I’M NOBODY SIDE B***H LETS JUST MAKE THIS CLEAR ON THIS GOOD MONDAY!” she wrote. “I don’t come 2nd to no b***h!”
Meanwhile, the Grammys unsurprisingly caused quite a commotion online for a slew of other reasons. While many looked forward to everyone’s red carpet fits, people were even more excited about the performances. Moreover, Questlove organized a fantastic spectacle honoring hip-hop’s 50th anniversary. Performers included Lil Uzi Vert, Rakim, Run-DMC, Missy Elliott, Queen Latifah, Too $hort, Busta Rhymes, Missy Elliot, GloRilla, and many more. Overall, it seems impossible to sum up hip-hop’s history in just a few minutes. Still, it was an absolute standout on Sunday Night (February 5) that touched millions of hearts.
Still, all that awards distraction didn’t make people forget about the huge rock on Yung Miami’s finger. In fact, other recent stories added to the evolving state of her love life. Recently, she reflected on meeting Diddy’s family and showed a lot of love despite their fling not having a particular label. “Mama Combs, I love her,” she shared. “She treat[s] me like I’m her own,” adding that Diddy’s twin daughters Jessie and D’lila are “so cool.” Regardless of what the future holds for the two, come back to HNHH for the latest on Yung Miami.
Meanwhile, according to TMZ’s sources, it was not Offset who started the fight, which makes sense considering the comments Quavo and Takeoff made over the past year regarding his falling out with the group. While Quavo and Takeoff spoke about “disloyalty,” it seemed that Offset had angered them in some way, leading to their making a joint album without him. Fans have speculated that it was Offset suing their label, Quality Control Music, that set things off; others believe that there was a romantic tryst between Offset and Saweetie, who was previously dating Quavo.
Whatever the reason, many fans were disappointed that the two remaining Migos were unable to reconcile their differences for the tribute. However, it looks like the tribute provided another wedge between them, making a Migos reunion less likely than ever.
Smith is not banned from attending the Grammys, though, and people noticed his absence on Sunday night, February 5. The 2023 Grammys featured a medley performance celebrating hip-hop’s 50th anniversary. The segment was directed and produced by Questlove, introduced by LL Cool J, and narrated by Black Thought.
Questlove told Entertainment Tonightthat Smith was “99.4 percent” committed to performing, “but they started shooting Bad Boys 4 this week, so he couldn’t make rehearsals.” Questlove added, “He wanted to do it.”
For those keeping score at home, Questlove apparently doesn’t hold grudges. Smith’s slap occurred as Rock was presenting the Oscar for Best Documentary. The award went to Questlove for Summer Of Soul, and Smith later apologized to Questlove for overshadowing his first Academy Award.
Smith posted a video last July apologizing not only to Questlove but to Rock, Rock’s mother, Rock’s entire family, his own family, and more.
“It really breaks my heart to have stolen and tarnished your moment,” Smith said to his “fellow nominees” in the video. “I can still see Questlove’s eyes. It happened on Questlove’s award, and you know, it’s like, ‘I’m sorry’ really isn’t sufficient.”
Watch the 50-year hip-hop anniversary tribute below.
50-year anniversary of hip-hop performance at the #GRAMMYs by some of the greats including RunDMC, LL Cool J, Salt N Peppa, Ice T, Queen Latifah, Wu-Tang, Big Boi, Busta Rhymes, Missy Elliott, Nelly, Too Short, GloRilla, The Roots, and more… pic.twitter.com/HmGB0bvGZX
I PRAY YOU FILL THEM W JOY AND WHOLENESS.
Geto Boys 
– TikTok – theaccidentalcougar 
GRAMMYs 
