50 Cent has called out the Grammy Awards for fumbling both Bad Bunny‘s performance and acceptance speech with their closed captioning.
As many others took notice and consequently called it out on social media, the Recording Academy opted not to caption what Bad Bunny was saying when he spoke in Spanish, instead writing, “Speaking non-English” and “singing in non-English.”
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In a series of Instagram posts on Thursday (February 9), 50 joined the chorus of outrage. “The Grammys need to be check about this,” the G-Unit rapper wrote with a screenshot of the caption fail. “Fvcking @badbunnypr bigger than everybody right now and you can’t pay for closed caption. Wtf is this speaking Non-English. FIX IT !”
In a second similar post, he added, “TF going on here, I DONT WANT TO HEAR SHIT FIX IT!”
The Bad Bunny blunder isn’t the only thing that people are calling out the Grammy Awards for on social media. While the Questlove-curated Hip Hop 50 performance largely drew rave reviews and helped the Grammys earn a three-year viewership high, there were still some fans left wondering why certain artists were left out.
Questlove took to Twitter this week to give fans a better understanding of how tough it was to squeeze multiple generation and regions into a 15-minute performance while also dealing with artists bailing at the last minute.
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“General ?s answered about last night: (some are asking if we are playing erasure games so uh….yeah I don’t play that so—in answering the questions of why wasn’t dada there?) 1. already booked 2. declined our offer straight up 3. or a third option im not gonna get into,” he began.
The Philadelphia native went on to explain that they deliberately avoided paying homage to dead artists and focused on those who were living.
“We had a criteria we wanted to follow: alive? harmonizing? turntablism? fighting shape? NYC? LA? BAY? ATL? NAWLINS? HOUSTON? MIDWEST? born before 1960? born after 1995? Superlyrical? Stylistic? Original? generally known by at least 2 generations?” he added, further highlighting the challenges that he and his fellow Hip Hop 50 organizers faced.
“Now granted they might not be your favorite (and there were 2 crucial 11th hour (more like 10 mins before taping) cancellations that mighta made it look like we were biased in our choices. but just understand we literally tried to SQUEEEEEEEZE everyone in.”
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In response to a fan who questioned why Ice-T was the only Los Angeles Hip Hop representative for a performance held in the City of Angels, Quest explained: “welp: I asked like 10 legends so….sometimes you gotta go with the one who wants you. again might not be your preference but most of hip hop has side gigs. Acting was the main issue. lotta movies being shot.”
And as for why there were so few artists from the 2010s involved, he replied: “because they said ‘no’, or they walked out.”
