Jesy Nelson has spoken out about the recent controversy regarding her new music video for ‘Boyz’.
The video, which dropped on October 8, has been met with a lot of criticism, with many viewers accusing the 30-year-old of altering her appearance to seem Black or racially ambiguous – which is known as “blackfishing”.
In an Instagram Live with Nicki Minaj, who she collaborated with for the track, Jesy said she did not mean to cause offence with the video.
The singer said: “I personally want to say that my intention was never, ever to offend people of colour with this video and my song because like I said, growing up as a young girl, this is the music that I listened to.”
“These are the videos that I watched and thought were the best. For me personally, ’90s/2000 hip hop, R&B music was the best era of music. I just wanted to celebrate that. I just wanted to celebrate that era of music because it is what I love.”
“My intention was never, ever, ever want to offend anyone and genuinely it actually does really hurt me that I may have offended people and actually, like, hurt people’s feelings just by genuinely celebrating something that I love.”
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Hitting back at claims she changed her hair style for the video, Jesy explained: “I genuinely didn’t think I was doing anything wrong, because I’ve got naturally curly hair.”
“It’s just hard for me because I was in a group with two women of colour for nine years and it was never brought up to me up until the last music video I did with them,” she said, referring to her ex Little Mix bandmates Leigh-Anne Pinnock and Jade Thirlwall.
It comes after messages allegedly shared between Leigh-Anne and Instagram user @nohun_ were posted on social media.
According to screenshots posted online, Leigh-Anne allegedly asked NoHun to make a video about Jesy “being a black fish” following the release of her debut solo single ‘Boyz’ – which features Nicki Minaj.
The alleged messages from Leigh-Anne also accused Jesy of blocking her and her Little Mix bandmates, Perrie Edwards and Jade Thirlwall, on social media.
Goss.ie has reached out to Leigh-Anne’s reps for a comment regarding these alleged messages.
Addressing the leaked messages in Monday’s Instagram Live, Nicki Minaj said: “Sweetheart, take them text messages and shove it up your f***ing ass, because when you do clown shit I got to treat you and talk to you like you a clown.”
“If you was in this woman’s group and you ain’t talk about this s**t for 10 years, and as soon as you see she got a video coming out with Nicki Minaj and Puffy, now you sending text messages and all this shit…”
“Print those text messages out, bust your ass open and shove them up your motherf***ing ass.”
“Stop trying to hurt people and kill people’s lives and careers, this is the way people feed their families. Stop – if you want a solo career, baby girl, just say that.”
The rapper continued: “You can go out and put your own music. We’re gonna support you and love you. That’s it. You don’t have to attack someone else. If that’s how you felt, why were you kiki’ing with her and being in the videos with her for 10 years?”
“Now, all of a sudden she’s not in a video with you, you have some negative, evil thing to do and say? Stop.”
“Only jealous people do things like this. It makes you a big jealous bozo. I love you guys but please don’t do this. Let these people be miserable all by themselves.”
Jesy didn’t say anything during Nicki’s rant, but occasionally laughed at some of her comments.
Later, Nicki took to Twitter to slam Leigh-Anne even further, writing: “JeLeigh btchs actin real messy…”
“If you know someone has been suicidal from bullying in the past, why try to get a bunch of ppl to bully them again about smthng else, on an even bigger scale? Shame on you— that’s rlly sad. You don’t know what ppl can deal with.”
