Guitar legend Carlos Santana has voiced regret and praised Beyonce after he suggested that she deserved to lose to Adele for the Album of the Year Grammy.
Santana, in an interview with the Australian Associated Press, said that Adele won because “she can sing, sing.”
“With all respect to our sister Beyonce, Beyonce is very beautiful to look at and it’s more like modeling kind of music — music to model a dress. She’s not a singer, singer, with all respect to her,” he was quoted as saying.
As for Adele, “she doesn’t bring all the dancers and props, she can just stand there and she just stood there and sang the song and that’s it, and this is why she wins.”
He was referring to Adele’s performance at Sunday’s Grammys, where the English singer took the stage twice — including a tribute to George Michael that she started over — while Beyonce put on an elaborate, abstract performance with New Age themes of matriarchy.
Santana, who was speaking ahead of a tour of Australia and other Asia-Pacific destinations, later clarified that he meant to praise Adele but not to denigrate Beyonce.
“My comment about Beyonce was regretfully taken out of context. I have the utmost respect for her as an artist and a person,” he wrote on Facebook.
“She deserves all the accolades that come her way. I wish Beyonce and her family all the best.”
Adele herself said Beyonce deserved to win the top Grammy for “Lemonade,” a celebration of African American women that she intertwined with a film.
Beyonce has won 22 Grammys but never Album of the Year despite three nominations, with some of her supporters feeling she has been sidelined due to racial bias.
Santana, himself a trailblazer as a Mexican American rocker, won Album of the Year with his band in 2000 for “Supernatural.”
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