Halsey Slams Op-Ed Criticizing Chappell Roan Grammys Speech: ‘I Hope You’re Embarrassed’
A recent column published by The Hollywood Reporter criticized Chappell Roan‘s best new artist acceptance speech at the 2025 Grammys, and Halsey is coming to her fellow pop star’s defense.
In a post to Instagram Stories, Halsey called out The Hollywood Reporter for publishing a guest column headlined “Chappell Groan: The Misguided Rhetoric of an Instant Industry Insider,” in which former music industry executive Jeff Rabhan said Roan’s speech calling out music labels was “a hackneyed and plagiarized script.”
More from Billboard
“I hope you’re embarrassed of the absolute personal attack that you’ve ran and disguised as critical journalism,” Halsey wrote to her Instagram Stories. “This is so far beneath the standard you should uphold as a publication.”
In his column, Rabhan — who worked as an A&R executive at Atlantic and Elektra Records, and currently serves as the CEO & co-founder of edutainment platform Bored-of-Ed — claimed that Roan’s call for labels to give artists improved healthcare benefits and a living wage was coming from “an artist basking in industry love while broadcasting na?veté and taking aim at the very machine that got her there.”
He continued, adding that “if labels are responsible for artists’ wages, health care and overall well-being, where does it end and personal responsibility begin? Should Chris Blackwell put a mint on her pillow and tuck her in at night, too? There is no moral or ethical obligation by any standard that hold labels responsible for the allocation of additional funds beyond advances and royalties.”
The “Ego” singer ripped into Rabhan’s “ranting, seething tantrum,” as they called it, claiming the former executive’s argument was “loaded with assumptions and accusations that generalize the experience of every artist to that of the most successful.” She pointed out that advances offered by labels only cover “affording survival” considering that making an album for a label “precludes [artists] from working a day job.”
“It’s a game of investment but the investment is towards producing the materials, the person *the ORGANIC MATERIAL* that is producing that product needs access to things like health care. Shocking, I know,” she wrote. “If you want to profit off of someone else’s art; that artist should have the basic living means to feel safe enough to create that art.”
In concluding the post, Halsey also pointed out that Roan is not an “instant industry insider,” as Rabhan claimed, but instead someone who has been working for over a decade to get to the position she currently occupies. “To compare the payoff of her actions to those of an industry titan with the power and financial leverage of Taylor Swift, when Chappell hasn’t even spun the block enough times to see the residuals of her long earned but sudden success, is irresponsible for someone with your experience in this industry,” she wrote. “Shame on you. Boot licking behavior.”
The speech in question saw Roan call out major labels for not providing adequate benefits to their signed artists, citing her own experience after being dropped from Atlantic in 2020. “It was so devastating to feel so committed to my art and to feel so betrayed by the system and to be so dehumanized to not have healthcare. If my label would have prioritized artists’ health, I could have been provided care by a company I was giving everything to,” she said.
Billboard and The Hollywood Reporter are both owned by PMC.
Best of Billboard
Sign up for Billboard's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Solve the daily Crossword
