In scenes reminiscent of Mean Girls, Adele broke her Grammy for Album of the Year in half on stage at the award ceremony on Sunday night, a happy accident as she declared it truly belongs to Beyoncé.
Adele, who also won the Song of the Year award, explained at length how she felt Lemonade was a more deserving winner than her own 25.
“I can’t possibly accept this award,” she said during her acceptance speech. “The Lemonade album was just so monumental, Beyoncé. It was so monumental and well thought-out and beautiful and soul-bearing… we appreciate that. All of us artists here adore you. You are our light.”
She later added backstage: “I thought it was her year. What the fuck does she have to do to win Album of the Year?”
The moment brought to mind Mean Girls for a lot of people, in which Lindsay Lohan’s protagonist Cady Heron breaks her Spring Fling queen crown into pieces and hands them to the other contestants. There are only photos of the Adele moment as CBS cut away before it happened.
It is essentially de rigueur to extol Beyoncé at award shows by this point, Kanye West having famously intervened during one of Taylor Swift’s VMAs acceptance speeches to point out that B is the more deserving winner.
Adele won the night’s biggest awards, though there were also multiple wins for Chance the Rapper and Drake. Beyoncé picked up Best Urban Contemporary Album for Lemonade.
Solange Knowles appeared to take a shot at the Grammys on Twitter after her sister missed out on Album of the Year, posting a link to a Tumblr statement Frank Ocean (who sat out of this year’s Grammys) wrote over the weekend calling them out for being out of touch.
“Waddup Frank,” she tweeted alongside the message, which came in response to Grammy Awards producer Ken Ehrlich blaming Frank’s absence on his “faulty” performance at the 2013 ceremony and saw him admonish the Grammys for honouring Taylor Swift’s 1989 over Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly.
Elaborating on her Beyoncé love backstage, Adele recalled: “I remember when I was 11 years old, I was with some girlfriends, and we were practicing a song to do at an assembly. I probably suggested the Spice Girls, and they said have you heard [Destiny’s Child’s] ‘No No No’? And I was like, ‘no, no, no.’ I remember how I felt hearing her voice. I fell in love immediately with her. The way I felt when I first heard ‘No No No’ was exactly the same as when I first heard ‘Lemonade’ last year. … The other artists who mean that much to me are all dead.”
