Even though the VMAs have come and gone, people still can’t stop talking about Lil’ Mama crashing Jay-Z and Alicia Key’s “Empire State of Mind” performance. Lil’ Mama apologized saying she just got “caught up in the moment.” Alicia Keys responded and said “We can appreciate her being overwhelmed and inspired, but we would have appreciated it if she would have did it from her seat” and everyone had a laugh by way of all the Twitter jokes and PhotoShopped pictures of Lil’ Mama appearing in everything from the Million Man March to Da Vinci’s Last Supper picture. It seems like the incident was dying down but yesterday, Hov spoke on it during an interview with Angie Martinez of Hot 97.  This is what he had to say:

“Me, personally, I would never do that. I would never have the nerve to do that. It’s just like, someone’s up there performing…We went through rehearsals, we did run-throughs and we worked really hard at the performance to put on a show for people and to interrupt that moment for us, you know, I don’t think that was the right thing to do.”

Like everyone else, Jay also likened the incident to Kanye’s infamous stage crash (which Jay had previously called rude):

“I actually thought it was the equivalent of what Kanye did to Taylor Swift but nobody really talked about that because I’m not a little sweet girl from the middle of America. And I’m cool with [Lil' Mama] being excited and all that but you have to understand, people put in work to make that performance happen, that took weeks the planning of it. If you look at those screens, we had to go to Yankee Stadium to shoot that live, there was a lot of planning. To disrupt that was out of line. I was a little angry to be honest, but what do I do, fight Lil Mama?”

I’m actually surprised Jay-Z spoke on this at all, since he usually chooses to “be above” such issues, but I guess it was bound to come up during his crazy press schedule for Blueprint 3 (can’t wait to watch him on Oprah today!).  Seems like we can finally put this issue to bed, well, as long as Lil’ Mama doesn’t put out any more ridiculous songs about the incident like the one below.

SOURCE 1, 2

TAGS: Alicia Keys, Angie Martinez, Jay-Z, Lil Mama

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