Bebe Rexha Rails Against Music Biz: ‘I’ve Been Silenced and PUNISHED By This Industry’
Written by djfrosty on July 2, 2024
Bebe Rexha launched a fiery broadside against a music industry on Tuesday morning (July 2), claiming in a series of X posts that she’s been mistreated and sabotaged at every turn. The 34-year-old singer who has helped write songs for everyone from Eminem to Selena Gomez, Tate McRae and Tinashe while scoring hits with G-Eazy, Martin Garrix and Florida Georgia Line wrote that she has the kind of inside dirt that could burn things to the ground.
“I could bring down a BIG chunk of this industry. I AM frustrated. I Have been UNDERMINED,” wrote Rexha, who has been writing songs and performing since she was a teenager. “I’ve been so quiet for the longest time. I haven’t seen the signs even though people constantly are bringing them up and they have been SO OBVIOUS. And when I have spoken up I’ve been silence and PUNISHED by this industry Things must change or I’m telling ALL of my truths. The good the bad and the ugly.’ I’ve been so quiet for the longest time. I haven’t seen the signs even though people constantly are bringing them up and they have been SO OBVIOUS. And when I have spoken up I’ve been silence and PUNISHED by this industry Things must change or I’m telling ALL of my truths. The good the bad and the ugly.”
At press time a spokesperson for Rexha’s label for the past decade-plus, Warner Records, had not returned Billboard‘s request for comment on the tweets and the singer had not specifically revealed what inspired her series of fired-up missives. When a fan asked “what happened again,” Rexha replied, “Again? You haven’t even heard 5 percent. You have NO IDEA.”
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In another exchange, a fan opined that, “nobody should be forgiven for the time they took your name out of ‘Hey Mama.’” The tweet appeared to reference the 2015 David Guetta song “Hey Mama,” which was co-written by Rexha, Guetta and several others. At the time, Rexha told Billboard that though she was credited as a co-writer, she was not initially listed as a vocalist on the track alongside Nicki Minaj and Afrojack, a situation that stuck in her craw given what she described at that time as an already rocky path in the music industry.
“I really wanted to be featured on it, because, you know, I’ve been signed and dropped, and now signed a second time, so it’s been hard, the then-25-year-old said. “What ended up happening was that it looked like a lot of names on the title, so they wanted to keep as many low features as possible. That’s what I was told, and it makes sense to me. I guess more than two [featured] names don’t look good on the radio.”
On Tuesday, though, in response to that fan’s “Hey Mama” comment, Rexha said, “My love. That? Compared to all the other stuff you don’t know about? That’s Child’s play.” The back-and-forth continued, with Rexha telling another commenter who asked what has stopped her from speaking out that, “THEY PUNISH YOU.”
A decade removed from the “Hey Mama” drama, Rexha also claimed that in the midst of promoting her latest single, “I’m the Drama,” she’s been struggling to, well, promote the song because of what she claims are further roadblocks from the industry. “Marketing? I have no budget for that,” she wrote of the song that dropped on June 28. “IM FED UP.”
The singer who released her third full-length studio album, Bebe, in 2023, continued to explain her frustration, writing, “This is not just coming from a place of anger. It’s sadness. I’m sitting in my hotel room in London Crying my eyes out. I’ve felt hopeless for the longest time. I’ve been walking a lot through this city and meeting fans and they have really ignited something inside of me.” In the midst of the string of laments, Rexha thanked her fans for continually giving her the strength to carry on.
To date, Rexha has scored four top 10 hits, including her 2017 FGL collab, “Meant To Be,” which peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, as well as the 2015 G-Eazy team-up “Me, Myself & I” (No. 7), “Hey Mama” (No. 8) and 2022’s David Guetta collab “I’m Good (Blue)” (No. 4); Rexha recently lashed out at Eazy, calling him an “ungrateful loser” and dubbing their song his “only real hit.”
Check out Rexha’s tweets below.