S. Samuel
Southern rapper Rick Ross has broken his silence on allegations of bowing out on R&B singer Chrisette Michele at last month's Soul Train Awards for their would-be performance; and reacted to her calling out hip-hop culture.
Admitting he has not spoken with Michele recently, Ross said he hoped they could clear up their misunderstandings if nominated for any Grammy award.
“I haven’t spoken to Chrisette Michele or her team. but I didn’t speak to her to [invite her to] the show either. It was something maybe the label set up. [But] her choice of words were ugly. Denouncing hip-hop, that ain’t cool. Using ugly words could give off the wrong impression. That could make your hat look ugly to me now. That could make your haircut look ugly to me now. Hopefully if we win a Grammy, she’ll come out and accept it with your boy. Give me a kiss on the cheek.” (The Source)
A few weeks ago, Ross explained why he did not take part in the Soul Train Awards performance with Michele.
“What exactly happened was I came the day before and they gave me a mic just to do rehearsals and I had no input on the performance,” Ross told radio personality Tim Westwood. “We done worked a long time to get in this position, just not to be thrown on stage. We had just done our thing at the BET Awards and we were a part of that performance down to the flames. I just want to be a part of the production when it surrounds me, that’s all. That’s it baby, that’s it, it wasn’t nothing personal to no one. It was no beefs.” (BBC Radio)
Prior to his explanation, Michele voiced her feelings on Ross’ no-show.
“I can’t get in touch with him no more. So I’m wondering honestly is he okay, is everything okay? Then I’m wondering how does this make us look to corporate America? Because we got folks spending hundreds and hundreds, hundreds of millions of dollars on putting a show together and then the only rap artist for the whole entire show, the only hip hop representation for the whole show…For hip-hop to walk out like that — you know to me that’s what it meant. To me it was like hip-hop just misrepresented itself because that’s not who we are, we are people who have fought threw the struggle and we came up from the ground, we’ve paved the way for people to be entrepreneurs to come into corporate America.” (“Cherry Martinez Show”)
Michele also said her comments were not just about Ross, but directed toward hip-hop as a whole.
“Collaborations especially are about unity in the African American community. The first thing I’m thinking when I go into the studio with a rapper is “Wow, this is going to the great for our community.” So that’s what I said on twitter and that was taken to every kind of blog site that I can think of and people were very upset about it. But at the end of the day it wasn’t necessarily to Rick, it was to how we represent ourselves to a population and the way that we represent ourselves outside of our beat box and outside of our boom box, and outside of our stoop.” (“Cherry Martinez Show”)
Check out Chrisette Michele speaking on Rick Ross below:
