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Delete Your Account: Check The Numbers, Bitch

Maxwell, Karlie Kloss, and Glenn Greenwald

Delete Your Account is a weekly column that takes the hot air out of celebrities, the media, and their social media shenanigans. Every Friday, I will decide whether each perpetrator should delete their accounts and never grace the internet again. This week, Maxwell forgets a woman's worth, Lily Allen can't seem to mind her own business, Judd Apatow needs better jokes, Karlie Kloss pretends she's a Beyoncé fan, and white journalists need to just ... stop.

I'm still not talking about the president's Twitter. I'm still not talking about the president's Twitter. I'm still not talking about the president's Twitter. I'm still not talking about the president's Twitter. I'm still not talking about the president's Twitter. I'm still not talking about the president's Twitter. I'm still not talking about the president's Twitter. I'm still not talking about the president's Twitter. I'm still not talking about the president's Twitter. I'm still not talking about the president's Twitter. I'm still not talking about the president's Twitter. Donald Trump tweets like he's enjoying an Absolut cocktail while untucking in the Interior Illusions Lounge on RuPaul's Drag Race. I'm still not talking about the president's Twitter. I'm still not talking about the president's Twitter. I'm still not talking about the president's Twitter. I'm still not talking about the president's —

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Anyway, let's get started?

MAXWELL

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I'm starting to think Maxwell, who turned Kate Bush's "This Woman's Work" into a bump-and-grind anthem, is a straight-up fool. Before we even dive into what he did this week, let's look at Exhibit A — last summer he sent out a flurry of tweets after the Dallas police shooting with the hashtags #americanlivesmatter, #whocaresaboutcolor, and #humanlivesmatter. He was dutifully dragged for turning All Lives Matter on people days after Philando Castile's death, so you'd think he would just go back to releasing his ditties and keep quiet on Twitter.

YOU'D THINK.

But here we are, in the midst of Black History Month, and Maxwell is still not done All Lives Mattering. Brother, you could've been brushing up on historical facts, eating some good-ass Popeye's, or offering yourself as a pen pal to White House inmate Omarosa, who's in need of black friends to converse with. Instead, you decided to tweet some shit like "not all of us look typical black."

First of all, what does this even mean? That some black people are dark-skinned and look like Michael Jackson and some are light-skinned and look like Michael Jackson? Black people already know that. What the fuck does that have to do with "including everyone"? Why do we have to include white people in Black History Month because light-skinned people exist? Does Maxwell think every white person is secretly Sarah Jane in Imitation of Life? To make matters worse, he followed it up with a tweet that said "#blackblueredwhitebiegehistory."

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One day into Betsy DeVos's America and people can't even spell the word "beige." Maxwell would be all the way canceled from this alone, but he decided to start fighting with people on Twitter, like author Daniel José Older, by bringing up the fact that Barack Obama's mother was white. So, because Obama is mixed, we should include white people in Black History Month. The logic here is so faulty that it sounds like one of Trump's executive orders.

But Maxwell was not quite done yet. One Twitter user insulted the album sales of 2016's blackSUMMERS'night by stating that they went "triple paper clip." Which might be funny if it were in any way true, but Twitter users often use alternative facts when they want to drag pop stars online, all for the sake of comedy. The first route is usually to drag their album sales. Instead of ignoring the woman, however, Maxwell slid himself further into headassery by SLIDING INTO HER DMs.

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I mean, damn, he didn't have to call her out by name like that. The numbers, of course, do not lie, but a simple "check the numbers, ma" would've sufficed.

SHOULD MAXWELL DELETE HIS ACCOUNT? His entire social media presence seems to be a disaster, but how could I ask someone to delete their account when they've granted us "Check the numbers, bitch," a new, admittedly hilarious meme?

LILY ALLEN

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Lily Allen really does not know how to mind her own damn business, does she? Last year she tried dragging Rita Ora while Ora was mourning Prince, and now she's going after Rihanna's Amelia Earhart–channeling Harper's Bazaar photo shoot. Sis, don't you have a new album to make or something? Why are you so focused on a damn magazine shoot?

Yeah, we all know Amelia was a pilot. Having a photo of Rihanna on the wings of a plane doesn't really … dispel that? For someone who claims to have read up on intersectional feminism after your racist "Hard Out Here" video got read for filth, you'd think you would just go, "Oh, look, these pictures are pretty" and move on. Unless you think Earhart is going to return from that last flight of hers and check out your tweets? Or maybe you're one of Earhart's long-lost descendants? Everyone was having fun looking at photos of one of the most gorgeous women on Earth and you're out here in your flat just tweeting away the pain. Allen spent the rest of the day arguing with the Navy, Rihanna's fan base, about whether the photo shoot actually honored Earhart. Who has the time for this? No grown adult should.

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SHOULD LILY DELETE HER ACCOUNT? Amelia Earhart didn't tweet, so how about you be like your idol and get off Twitter.

JUDD APATOW

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Judd Apatow, king of tweeting about Bill Cosby but being surprisingly silent about Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, or even Casey Affleck this awards season, has some more wisdom to share with you all: Donald Trump tweets like a 14-year-old girl. Because 14-year-old girls are dumb, right? Because they're racists? Because they ban Muslims from America? Because they strip LGBTQ people of their rights? Because they cook white-nationalist brownies in their Easy-Bake Ovens?

I'm not sure. The only thing I do know is that I've already put more effort into responding to Apatow's dumb joke than he did in making it.

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SHOULD JUDD DELETE HIS ACCOUNT? Always.

KARLIE KLOSS

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So, Karlie Kloss did an interview with Love magazine in which she stans for Beyoncé. This isn't really news, because everyone worships Beyoncé — even racist TheBlaze reporter Tammy Laganja, who secretly listens to "Upgrade U" before she goes to bed and prays that Fox News will come along and cut her an actual paycheck.

But there's something a little … let's say … off about Kloss's interview:

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She claims to have been a Beyoncé megafan since Destiny's Child, but when asked to name how Beyoncé influenced her, she says "Waterfalls" is the soundtrack to her life.

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Really, girl? "Waterfalls"? A TLC song?! Did you first hear it on the soundtrack for Hidden Fences?

SHOULD KARLIE DELETE HER ACCOUNT? Karlie actually took her embarrassment in stride and owned it, so she gets a reprieve this week.

GLENN GREENWALD

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Ah, my favorite genre of journalism: white journalists who decided that black slang is "cliché" just because they've heard a bunch of white people using it. This isn't even particularly about Greenwald's comments, but more about the fact that social media allows white people in the media to pluck phrases they find fun and entertaining and use them ad nauseum and, most of the time, incorrectly, like "shade."

Some quick googling for the etymology of "receipts" would have saved Greenwald some time:

The phrase came into the American pop culture lexicon due to a 2002 ABC News interview between Diane Sawyer and Whitney Houston. Intended as publicity for the forthcoming album Just Whitney, the interview ended up diving deep into Whitney’s relationship with Bobby Brown and her history of drug use. At one point, Diane asks Whitney about an alleged $730,000 drug habit. To which which Whitney responds, “Come on! $730K? I wish. I wish whoever’s making that money off of me could share it with me. No way. No way. I wanna see the receipts. From the drug dealer that I bought $730,000 worth of drugs from. I wanna see the receipts.” I. Wanna. See. The. Receipts. And from that, a phrase came to be that is still very much popular to this day. Don’t believe what someone’s saying? Ask them to show you the receipts.

But rather than call out white journalists who turn cultural slang into "overnight political phrases," people always have to call those phrases "cliché" and declare them over. We've actually been using "receipts" for quite some time and are doing just fine with it, so why is black slang denigrated just because someone on CNN learned a cute new phrase?

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