Diane Warren Apologizes For Maybe (Read: Definitely) Shading Beyoncé

Ammal Hassan

Rule number one: don't poke the Beyhive. After dishing out a shady tweet maybe-sort-of-most-definitely regarding Beyoncé's songwriting credits on her excellent new album, Renaissance, Diane Warren faced a barrage of angry tweets and messages from Bey's fans. The inevitable apology has since dropped, which we'll get to, but first, let's dig into this drama.

Warren, who has penned famous hits like Celine Dion's "Because You Loved Me," Aerosmith's "I Don't Wanna Miss A Thing" and even Beyoncé's "I Was Here," started by asking "How can there be 24 writers on a song?" followed by a rolling eyes emoji. People quickly caught on that Warren was referencing Beyoncé's new cut, "Alien Superstar," which has become one of the most popular hits off of Renaissance and credits 24 people. Warren didn't stop there, she continued a mini thread and added that she was "just curious" and her question "wasn't meant to be shade." After about an hour and hundreds of tweets from fans she concluded, "Ok, it's prob samples that add up the amount of writerrs."

That however, still didn't stop fans or Beyoncé collaborators from continuing to defend the singer. They bombarded Warren's mentions, some attacking her personally–one user even tweeted "Diane Warren acts like her haircut." Others pointed out that as a legendary songwriter, Warren is well aware of how sampling works so her comments were "not a good look for someone at her level." Overall, the tweets sparked a conversation about the history of Black art and the challenging of white, patriarchal, capitalistic ideas of creation.

Even The Dream, who is a major collaborator on Renaissance, chimed in to give his two cents. "You mean how’s does our (Black) culture have so many writers, well it started because we couldn’t afford certain things starting out, so we started sampling and it became an Artform," he wrote. Later he added that Warren would not want the "smoke" of a one-to-one song writing contest.

"You know I love you," he concluded, "But come on. Stop acting like your records haven’t been sampled"

In response, Warren thanked him for educating her and admitted to not knowing the history behind sampling for Black artists before adding there was "no need to be mean about it." Since, she has also apologized to Beyoncé for the comments and reassured fans that she meant no harm.

"Ok, I meant no disrespect to Beyoncé, who I've worked with and admire," she wrote, "I'm sorry for the misunderstanding"

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