The Bear actress Ayo Edebiri seemingly apologized in a Saturday Night Live skit for her moot comments about Jennifer Lopez and her singing talent on a podcast in 2020.
The SNL skit, “Why’d You Say It,” aired Saturday, Jan. 3, and saw Edebiri’s character, Annie, and two others as contestants on a game show, where they explain why they left specific comments under Instagram posts.
The end of the skit showed a fed-up Annie (Edebiri) ranting about understanding the lesson, briefly and vaguely mentioning the podcast comment.
“Okay, we get it! It’s wrong to leave mean comments or post comments just for clout or run your mouth on a podcast, and you don’t consider the impact ’cause you’re 24 and stupid,” Edebiri confessed. “But I think I speak for everyone when I say, from now on, we’re going to be a lot more thoughtful about what we post online.”
The audience erupted in laughter and cheers in response to Edebiri’s declaration.
The podcast statement in the SNL skit pertained to the 28-year-old actress’s February 2020 interview on the Scam Goddess podcast, where she and the host, Laci Mosley, dubbed Lopez’s singing talent a scam.
“Today, I was actually thinking about one of my favorite scams of all time because J.Lo is performing at the Super Bowl halftime show,” Edebiri said, with Mosley agreeing that her performing at the nation’s biggest televised event was a scam itself.
“Her whole career is one long scam,” the Big Mouth actress added. “She thinks she’s on multiple tracks, but it’s not her. I think…she thinks that she’s still good [at singing] even though she’s not singing for most of these songs. I was reading up…a lot of the writeups of the song(s) would be like, ‘J. Lo didn’t have time to make it to the studio. J. Lo was busy.’ Doing what? Not singing, obviously!”
Edebiri’s resurfaced comments peeved many in-denial JLovers, who unnecessarily bashed her for speaking the truth. But Black people came through and defended the thespian.
Edebiri, who hosted SNL, never discredited the 54-year-old’s talent (acting and dancing), only voiced what Black people knew and have been saying for years.
No one can forget the “singer’s” impromptu karaoke performance of her screaming “Let’s Get Loud” in Italy. Nor the video of her vocal lessons with her daughter, Emme, who sounded a thousand times better than her superstar mama.
But rewinding further, Lopez’s famous tracks revealed how the singer manipulated her way into the music business. Hint: exploiting Black artists.
For example, singer and actress Christina Milian’s vocals were in the demo track of “Play,” the third song from Lopez’s 2001 sophomore album, J.Lo. Producers and Lopez used the singer’s demo vocals in the final song, as evident in the chorus. Black people couldn’t miss Milian’s voice. Nevertheless, Milian was credited as a background vocalist and writer but not as a feature.
The same thing happened with Ashanti for “I’m Real” and “Ain’t It Funny,” but the “Body On Me” singer wasn’t credited for “Ain’t It Funny.”
Lopez exemplified how non-Black women have benefitted from Black business at the expense of Black people. Take Jennifer Aniston, a star of the hit sitcom Friends (the white version of Living Single). She cried “antisemitic” for actor Jamie Foxx’s post containing a Jesus analogy that wasn’t antisemitic, ameliorating her public image at the expense of Foxx’s.
Lopez did the same with Ashanti and Milian, using their vocals in her music and passing them off as her own.
