Ari Lennox performs during the 43rd Annual BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival Opening Night at the Prospect Park Lena Horne Bandshell on July 31, 2021 in New York City.
Roy RochlinAri Lennox has been arrested in Amsterdam after she claims on social media to have been racially profiled in the airport Monday morning (Nov. 29).
Early Monday, Lennox sent out a flurry of tweets about her negative experience with airport security in Amsterdam, writing, “F— Amsterdam security. They hate black people.” In her final tweet, Lennox wrote, “I’m being arrested in Amsterdam for reacting to a woman racially profiling me.”
Dutch military police, who are in charge of security at Amsterdam Schipol airport, told Reuters that the singer (real name Courtney Shanade Salter) was arrested for disturbing public order after accusing airline personnel of racial discrimination. The police said Lennox was held for acting aggressively toward an airline official and for being drunk in public.
“Our unit found a woman full of emotions, that wouldn’t calm down,” spokesman Robert van Kapel told the publication. “That’s why she had to be taken into custody.” It remains unclear how long the “Shea Butter Baby” star will remain in custody since police are still investigating claims of possible threats Lennox made during the incident.
Billboard has reached out to Lennox’s reps for comment but did not hear back at press time.
The R&B singer performed her latest single “Pressure” and “Unloyal” with Summer Walker from the latter’s Billboard 200-topping album Still Over It at the 2021 Soul Train Awards, which was taped at New York’s Apollo Theater on Nov. 20 and was broadcast Sunday night on BET.
See Lennox’s tweets about her arrest below.
NEWS
No matter what you thought of the Kendrick Lamar and Drake battle, there was only one undisputed winner by the end of it all: the reaction community in the worlds of streaming and YouTube. Your favorite content creators broke down the bars, reacted to all the most shocking moments, and helped this showdown become one of hip-hop's most culturally significant and resonant moments in a long time... For better or worse. See, the battle's technically not over yet, but only because the 6ix God's idea of victory is clearly quite different. In his federal defamation lawsuit against Universal Music Group – his label – for releasing K.Dot's "Not Like Us," he named various content creators who allegedly helped boost the track's widespread popularity and, as a result, its supposedly defamatory nature.
Furthermore, the specific allegation that Drake brings up in this highly controversial lawsuit is that UMG "whitelisted" copyright claims for YouTubers, streamers, etc. concerning "Not Like Us." This means that they would be able to monetize their content without facing a copyright claim from UMG over "Not Like Us," and this isn't really an allegation because various creators have backed this up. But a few important (alleged) caveats that people are talking about online need to be clear. First, "whitelisting" supposedly happens on behalf of a record label behind a song like the West Coast banger, and UMG is instead the distributor of that track. Secondly, as rapper and online personality ScruFaceJean brings up as seen in the post below, tracks like "Push Ups" were also "whitelisted" by its team.
Along with Jean, many other of your favorite content creators spoke out against this Drake lawsuit. Zias! and B.Lou, for example, spoke with their lawyer about the possibility of countersuing for emotional distress, as they found the Toronto superstar's accusations and his implication of them very disturbing and misguided. NoLifeShaq also dragged The Boy through the mud, calling him "soft" and positing that, whether "whitelisting" happened or not, they would react to "Not Like Us" accordingly as they did to his own tracks.
In addition, it's important to bring up that many others fans have pointed to how Drake excitedly used streamers to generate hype and reaction clips for his own diss tracks against Kendrick Lamar. The most direct example is with Kai Cenat, whom he texted to "stay on stream" before dropping "Family Matters." Ironically, the Twitch giant appears in this clowned-upon defamation lawsuit as an example of what the OVO mogul's accusations and implications are. And one more thing: there is no direct link between monetization and algorithmic boosting on sites like YouTube. With all this in mind, content creators seem to feel almost insulted at the idea that they only reacted to the two biggest rappers in the world beefing with each other because one of them would allow them to make money. If Drizzy knew the first thing about the reaction community, maybe he wouldn't have included this...
