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Celebrities Who Openly Trashed Beyonce

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Beyoncé built an empire untouchable enough to make “Bow Down” a mission statement, but a surprising roster of famous names still lined up to take a swing at her.

The Beyhive has spent more than a decade defending Beyoncé Knowles-Carter from every angle, and for good reason — few artists draw as much unconditional loyalty. But that hasn’t stopped rappers, singers, columnists and even a fellow actress from publicly airing grievances against her, sometimes with receipts, sometimes with nothing but pure shade. Here’s what actually happened in six of the loudest instances.

• 50 Cent used the 2015 Grammys to argue Beck’s Album of the Year win over Beyoncé’s self-titled record was justified, pointing out Beck wrote and produced his own album while Beyoncé’s project ran through eleven producers.
• Azealia Banks spent much of 2016 attacking Lemonade online, calling Beyoncé unoriginal and accusing her of exploiting Black women’s pain for commercial gain.
• Sanaa Lathan denied biting Beyoncé’s face at a party after Tiffany Haddish’s early-2018 retelling sent the Beyhive after her with a wave of bee emojis.

50 Cent Picks Beck Over Beyoncé

When Beck beat out Beyoncé’s self-titled album for Album of the Year at the 2015 Grammys, plenty of fans assumed the fix was in. 50 Cent disagreed publicly, defending the Academy’s choice on the grounds that Beck actually wrote and produced his own record. Beyoncé’s album, he noted, credited eleven different producers — a point he used to argue that “artistry” and “assembly” aren’t the same thing, regardless of chart numbers or cultural weight.

Keri Hilson’s Long-Running Friction

Keri Hilson’s tension with Beyoncé dates back to 2009, when she was widely accused of taking a shot at her on the remix to “Turnin’ Me On,” with lyrics that seemed to needle a reigning pop queen to sit down and start a family. The friction resurfaced in 2011 at the Soul Train Awards, when a reporter handed Hilson a copy of Juicy magazine featuring Beyoncé and Jay-Z on the cover and asked her to hold it up for the camera. Hilson flatly refused, telling the interviewer on camera she wouldn’t do it — a moment that clipped its way around the internet and drew a swarm of backlash from the Beyhive.

Keyshia Cole Calls Out “Bow Down”

Keyshia Cole didn’t hide behind subtext. When Beyoncé released “Bow Down/I Been On” in 2013, Cole went straight to Twitter to accuse her of hypocrisy, arguing it was rich for an artist who preaches female solidarity to turn around and tell women to bow down. The exchange became one of the more direct celebrity-on-celebrity callouts Beyoncé has faced, precisely because Cole didn’t dress it up in vague shade — she named the song and made her case.

Azealia Banks Goes After Lemonade

Nobody on this list has been louder or more relentless than Azealia Banks. Her running commentary hit a peak around the 2016 release of Lemonade, when she took to social media to call Beyoncé an unoriginal artist and accuse her of exploiting Black women and Black pain for the visual album’s imagery. Banks went further, tweeting that Beyoncé wasn’t intelligent enough to have conceived the project’s concepts herself — a claim that only fueled more back-and-forth between Banks and the Beyhive, a dynamic not unlike the pile-ons chronicled in celebrity feuds that started out friendly and curdled fast.

Banks argued Beyoncé wasn’t sharp enough to have come up with Lemonade’s ideas on her own.

Piers Morgan’s Daily Mail Takedown

Piers Morgan brought the criticism to print. In a 2016 column for the Daily Mail, he blasted Lemonade as needlessly political and divisive, accusing Beyoncé of shameless exploitation for featuring mothers of police brutality victims as part of the project. The column drew heavy pushback but also gave Beyoncé’s critics a rare mainstream media voice to point to, beyond the usual social-media sniping that defines most musician-on-musician beef.

The Sanaa Lathan Bite Rumor

Early 2018 brought one of the stranger entries on this list. Tiffany Haddish told a story about an actress biting Beyoncé’s face at an afterparty, and rumors almost immediately pointed to Sanaa Lathan. Lathan denied it outright, but that didn’t stop the Beyhive from flooding her mentions with bee emojis — a reminder of just how fast and how far Beyoncé’s fanbase will go to defend her, warranted or not.

None of it has dented Beyoncé’s standing — Lemonade alone moved well over a million copies in its first week and cemented her as one of the most decorated acts of her generation regardless of what Banks, Morgan or Cole had to say about it. But the running tally of famous detractors is long enough now that it’s practically its own subplot, sitting right alongside the music industry’s other long-simmering rivalries and side-eyes.