Fat Joe is slamming Viacom and BET for indefinitely suspending two of its biggest award shows.
During the Wednesday (Aug. 6) episode of podcast Joe and Jada, the “Lean Back” rapper reacted to the announcement by BET CEO Scott Mills to Billboard.
Mills told the publication that there’s been an indefinite pause of the BET Hip-Hop Awards and the Soul Train Music Awards, although the network has a “team that’s actively thinking about where those award shows might best live as the media climate.”
To Joey Crack, BET is cleaning house.
“This is a form of gentrification, what’s going on,” he told Jadakiss in the clip below.
The rapper then recounted BET’s history, saying that it “came up as a community station for Black people” and “urban culture,” and was sold to Viacom and Paramount by network co-founder Bob Johnson.
“Little by little over the years, quietly they’ve been firing a lot of people behind the scenes at BET and everybody who has something to say,” Joe continued. “And I know ‘cause I’ve been working on the BET Hip-Hop Awards for three years. It was like the budget, not for me, but the budget just kept getting chopped and chopped and chopped.”
The rapper added that while the BET Hip-Hop Awards was undercut, last year’s Video Music Awards seemed to have a higher budget, noting Katy Perry‘s elaborate Video Vanguard Award performance.
“They still got all the tricks. They still got the budgets. They got the shit,” Joe continued. “This was like a form of gentrification. They kept underfunding them, underfunding them, underfunding them. And you ain’t got no money to be creative. That’s why you was watching the ratchet awards and all that. They ain’t had no bread.”
Joe acknowledged that BET has afforded him the opportunity to be the “Steve Harvey of hip-hop,” but expressed that the network’s award shows cannot function “without no money, no promotions, no staff.”
“You might as well have called it the Independent Awards,” he continued. “And so, no Soul Train, no BET Awards. Uh, but guess what? We got the VMAs.”
The rapper also predicted that the BET Awards could be on the chopping block.
“That’s seconds away. The writing’s on the wall,” he said. “If you see everything else falling down, it’s a domino. That’s the next one. One little fumble by Kevin Hart—one little joke too many, that’s over, too.”
“Sometimes the goal is to buy your project to suppress you,” he concluded. “So the goal is, yo, some big company might come and be like ‘Yo, we want to buy Rewind It 10.’ Throw us the bill and then like, ‘Shut it down,’ like, ‘We’ve got to keep this thing moving.'”
It was reported in June that BET’s parent company, Paramount Global, was impacted by layoffs, causing the network to also cut some of its staff. In a statement, Mills planned for BET to begin “implementing a streamlined organization structure” for the network to “continue to operate the functions that are core to our mission, value proposition and market leadership position.”
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