At the 2004 Grammy Awards, despite 50 Cent’s hopes of winning Best New Artist, Evanescence secured the award for their acclaimed debut album ‘Fallen.’ 50 Cent protested his loss by walking on stage during Evanescence’s acceptance speech. In a recent interview with The Daily Beast, the band’s lead singer Amy Lee recalled the event as a ‘strange time.’ She said:
“50 Cent hates my guts. It’s just one of those things… I mean, truthfully, we thought he was going to win too. It was such a wild night. People are like, ‘What was it like to win a Grammy?’ and I’m like, ‘Stressful!’ I mean, it’s wonderful now to have them, but it was surreal… I just remember thinking, ‘I don’t even think anybody in this room knows who we are.’”
Amy Lee remarked that 50 Cent didn’t actually say anything when he took the stage but instead just walked around a bit. When she had just come on stage, Lee jokingly said, ‘Oh, what did I do?… Thanks, 50.’ She continued to talk about the matter:
“You know when you’re just in shock? He didn’t do anything, he didn’t grab the mic, it wasn’t that bad. He just sort of like, made an appearance. It was like Zoolander when he thought he won. No, he never said anything to me, but he likes to talk about me and how he was robbed. I don’t want to start a beef with him. Thank you for saying I looked unfazed, I was so fazed. Everything around me was chaos and I was like, I’m going to stand here and see if this is real later, if I wake up or not.”
Amy Lee On Why She’s Been Embracing ‘Fallen’ Era
Amy Lee, now 41, described it as ‘trippy’ to revisit the archives and revisit the audio recordings from her teenage years, when she made the lyrics and melodies for ‘Fallen.’ She compares it to reading an old diary and describes some of the demos as ‘pretty cringy.’ In the same interview, she commented:
“I went through that phase. I’m over it. I’m ready to accept my whole self. I think it would be way more like ‘agh!’ if it was the only thing that existed of us in the world. It would be cringier if that was the only thing we ever did and then I fell away and didn’t have any representation of my adult self.”
Amy had other battles during the Fallen era. Having lost her sister in childhood, Fallen’s songs were laden with adolescent angst as well as lingering grief. In another recent interview with Kerrang! she had this to say about that period:
“It’s hard to explain what I was going through without telling you a bunch of stuff that I don’t want. The true point is it was a rollercoaster.”
50 Cent Is Still Upset About The Grammy’s Decision
50 Cent has made no secret of the fact that he is frustrated about losing the Grammy for Best New Artist to Evanescence in 2004. The rapper made the following comments before he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame event in 2020:
“You got the largest debut hip hop album [but] you don’t got no Best New Artist trophy. The Best New Artist, they gave that shit to Evanescence. Can you find fucking Evanescence? I ain’t seen Evanescence since that night. Since that night they gave them the trophy.”
You can watch the statements made by hip-hop artist 50 Cent below.
