As Nicki Minaj started an important conversation about race in the wake of the MTV VMA nominations, the question everyone kept asking was: but what does Piers Morgan think about this?
Luckily the wait was relatively short, as the level-headed Daily Mail columnist wrote a piece where he described Minaj as a ‘stroppy little piece of work’ and said the reason her single “Anaconda” didn’t get nominated for Video Of The Year was because it wasn’t very good.
“Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Bruno Mars, Ed Sheeran and Kendrick Lamar all made better ones,” he said.
“That’s not my opinion because I’m white. Or because I prefer skinny women to voluptuous women (for the record, I don’t…). It’s my opinion based on watching them all, and agreeing with the nominations,” he said.
“For Nicki Minaj, who is indisputably very talented, to play the race card just because her video didn’t get the nomination she wanted is a cheap piece of faux outrage deliberately designed to stir up unnecessary racial tension where it shouldn’t exist. Shame on you, Ms Minaj,” he said.
When it came out at the end of 2014, however, Nicki Minaj’s video for "Anaconda" broke records; it got 19.6 million views in 24 hours, demolishing the previous record of 12.3 million set by none other than Miley Cyrus, whose video for "Wrecking Ball" went on to win the Best Video Award at the VMAs last year.
Morgan had a productive day, writing his column while simultaneously trying to dismantle the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag for reasons that are still unclear.
He went on to describe an attempted meeting with Nicki Minaj when she performed on America’s Got Talent, saying his three sons aged 16, 13 and 9 were eager to say hello but her ‘goons’ prevented them from going into her dressing room.
He concluded the allegations of were ‘a load of old hogwash’ and explained that, actually, the music industry isn't rife with racism any more because many of the world's top musicians are black.
Well that's that cleared up, then.
