Fat Joe has hit out at BET’s decision to cancel both the Hip Hop and Soul Train awards.
Speaking on his Joe & Jada Podcast, the “Make it Rain” rapper detailed his disgust at the decision.
He said: “This is a form of gentrification.”
Joe continued: “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. 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.”
He added: “They still got all the tricks. They still got the budgets. They got the shit. 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 also suggested that the main BET Awards would be the next block to fall: “That’s seconds away. The writing’s on the wall. 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.”
BET CEO Scott Mills confirmed that there were currently no plans to bring back the two awards shows.
He said to Billboard: “I would say that it’s less about them being no longer and more about our team having to reimagine them for this changing media landscape that we find ourselves in.”
Mills added: “I think what we’re going to see are more people taking franchises and saying, ‘This might have started on linear television, but now I’m going to move it to another space. Do I move it to streaming? Or do I move it to another platform?’”
The BET Hip Hop Awards were established in 2006 with the last ceremony occurring in October 2024 with Fat Joe hosting the night.
Kendrick Lamar was the big winner on the night, taking home eight awards from eleven nominations.
