Photo Credit: Chappell Roan at the 2025 Grammy Awards by Kevin Mazur / Getty Images for The Recording Academy
An op-ed column slammed Chappell Roan’s ‘uninformed’ Grammy acceptance speech, sparking backlash from fans and artists alike — including Halsey.
In a post to her Instagram Story, Halsey called out The Hollywood Reporter for its guest column entitled, “Chappell Groan: The Misguided Rhetoric of an Instant Industry Insider.” Written by former music industry executive Jeff Rabhan, the piece criticized Chappell Roan’s acceptance speech for Best New Artist at the 2025 Grammys, calling it a “hackneyed and plagiarized script.”
Rabhan worked as an A&R executive and Atlantic and Elektra Records, and is the current CEO and co-founder of the edutainment platform Bored-of-Ed. In his column, Rabhan claimed Roan’s call to action for labels to provide artists with healthcare benefits and a living wage comes from an artist “basking in industry love while broadcasting naivete and taking aim at the very machine that got her there.”
Halsey tore into what she called Rabhan’s “ranting, seething tantrum,” calling the argument “loaded with assumptions and accusations that generalize the experience of every artist to that of the most successful.” The singer also pointed out advances offered by labels only cover “affording survival,” given that creating an album for a label “precludes [artists] from working a day job.”
“I hope you’re embarrassed of the absolute personal attack that you’ve ran and disguised as critical journalism,” wrote Halsey, taking aim at The Hollywood Reporter directly. “This is so far beneath the standard you should uphold as a publication.”
“It’s a game of investment, but the investment is toward producing the materials, [and] the person — the organic material — that is producing that product needs access to things like healthcare. Shocking, I know,” Halsey continued. “If you want to profit off of someone else’s art, that artist should have the basic living means to feel safe enough to create that art.”
Halsey also posited that Roan is not the “instant industry insider” that Rabhan proclaims her to be. Instead, she is someone who has been working for over a decade to get where she is today.
“To compare the payoff of her actions to those of an industry titan with the power and financial leverage of Taylor Swift, when Chappell hasn’t even spun the block enough times to see the residuals of her long-earned but sudden success, it is irresponsible for someone with your experience in this industry,” Halsey concluded. “Shame on you. Boot-licking behavior.”
Chappell Roan’s Grammy acceptance speech saw her calling out major labels for not providing adequate benefits to their artists. She cited her own experiences having been dropped by Atlantic in 2020.
“It was so devastating to feel so committed to my art and to feel so betrayed by the system and to be so dehumanized to not have healthcare,” she said. “If my label would have prioritized artists’ health, I could have been provided care by a company I was giving everything to.”