If you saw the Grammys last weekend, you'll have witnessed Beyonce duetting with a panting, apple-faced pensioner wrapped in a scrap of tinfoil who Beyonce claimed was Tina Turner.
And that's got Aretha Franklin thoroughly narked. You see, Beyonce introduced Tina Turner at the Grammys by calling her "the queen." And Aretha Franklin is under the impression that she's actually the queen.
The queen of what, we don't know. Although judging by her performance at the Grammys, our first guess would be that Aretha Franklin is the queen of competition-standard sausage-gobbling.
Although the rightful focus of the Grammys on Sunday was the way that Amy Winehouse managed to sing two songs without falling over, throwing up, smoking any hard drugs or hacking away at any of her bodyparts with a razorblade, other people found different things to concentrate on.
And, although the Grammys duet between Beyonce and Tina Turner wasn't especially pleasant, that's what Aretha Franklin has focused her mind on, anyway. Luckily Aretha Franklin isn't too concerned with the performance itself, or the way that Tina Turner's borderline-obscene silver corset pulled her 68-year-old torso in so tight that she made a noise like a choking baby rather than singing, but the way she was introduced.
You see, Beyonce's spoken-word introduction of Tina Turner mainly involved listing other female singers and saying that none of them are as good as Tina Turner, because Tina Turner is "the queen." And since Aretha Franklin thought that actually she was the queen, she's started getting shitty about it to anyone who'll listen. According to The Associated Press:
When Aretha Franklin is unhappy, she does not mince words. On Tuesday, the longtime Queen of Soul slammed Beyonce Knowles' intro to Tina Turner at Sunday's Grammy Awards, in which Knowles called Turner, not Franklin, "the queen." "I am not sure of whose toes I may have stepped on or whose ego I may have bruised between the Grammy writers and Beyonce," Franklin said in a statement issued by her publicist. "However, I dismissed it as a cheap shot for controversy."
If it was a cheap shot for controversy, then might we suggest that it isn't actually a particularly good one, since the only person to show even a flicker of anything approaching outrage is Aretha Franklin herself. Everyone else was probably wondering how long it took for Aretha to grow her upper arms to get to the size of a fat man's thighs.
Perhaps the organisers of the Grammys will pay attention to Aretha Franklin's tantrum, though, and in the future only refer to Tina Turner as a duchess or low-ranking marchioness or something. And maybe Aretha Franklin should think of copyrighting this queen thing – we hear several monarch states, a rock group, a scallop and a chess piece are already encroaching on her territory.
But, you know, maybe 'queen' isn't a big enough word to describe Aretha Franklin. Maybe 'planet' or 'galaxy' would be better – after all, we're pretty sure that Aretha Franklin does exert her own gravitational pull now.
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Crabby says
Somewhere Queen Latifah must be throwing a fit. Check out http://www.crabbygolightly.com for some thoughts on the cat fight between Aretha and Beyonce. CrabbyGolightly.com. Taking a dim view of celebrity, media and power.