Kevin Durant has responded to the backlash over the “ableist” lyrics found in the new Beyoncé single “Heated.”
The Brooklyn Nets star scoffed at the entire situation in an Instagram post from HipHop-N-More on Monday (August 1) which highlighted the news.
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The public outcry prompted Beyoncé and her team to scrub the lyrics from the song, which KD evidently finds ridiculous. As he wrote in the comment section: “This is a joke lol.”
Durant isn’t alone in his thinking. His comment elicited several subsequent responses from people such as Denaun Porter who simply left three “100 percent” emojis. Another person wrote: “America complain about all kinda dumb shit but thangs of importance smh.”
Renaissance, Beyoncé’s sixth studio album, was released on Friday (July 29). Twitter soon rallied over the song “Heated” in which Beyoncé sings: “Spazzin’ on that ass, spazz on that ass.”
In the medical field, the word “spastic” is often used to describe a disability that makes it challenging for people to control their muscles, especially in their arms and legs.
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A writer for The Guardian, Hannah Diviney, was inspired to write an entire essay on the project. She offered a brief synopsis of it via Twitter: So @Beyonce used the word ‘spaz’ in her new song Heated. Feels like a slap in the face to me, the disabled community & the progress we tried to make with Lizzo.
She added: “Guess I’ll just keep telling the whole industry to ‘do better’ until ableist slurs disappear from music.”
As Diviney mentioned, Lizzo was also criticized for using the same term in her single “GRRLS” and wound up removing the lyric. Cardi B, who collaborated with Lizzo on the single “Rumors,” responded to the controversy and said she wouldn’t have been so accommodating.
“Ya will do mental gymnastics to include me in anything that people are getting dragged for,” she wrote. “People have called me out for plenty of shit .Yall do it every week
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She continued: “SOMETHINGS I apologize for & some things I will tell y’all TO SUCK DICK & personally If I was Lizzo I would of said SMD!”
