By Zanub Saeed
After receiving harsh criticisms from fans and critics about a Burger King television spot she did earlier in the year, singer Mary J. Blige revealed that her involvement and the final cut of the ad had left her devastated.
In the ad, which was meant to be more of a sequence, Blige stands inside a Burger King restaurant and sings about the brand's new crispy chicken snack wraps, but fans lauded it, stating that it stereotyped that black people loved chicken. Blige apologized about the ad, said BET, and said that she initially went into the project with good intentions, though the final cut did not show that.
"It's just something I thought would have been a great branding opportunity that's what I thought it was," Blige said this week on The Angie Martinez Show. "I went online to listen to the remix I did with Fat Joe and I'm looking for that [song] 'Another Round' and all I could see was Burger King and chicken and the buffoonery.
"It just broke my heart," Blige continued. "People were just going crazy and I understand the laughter and the jokes and the stuff that was happening. That's all good. You're supposed to do that when something like that happens. It made people's websites go up. It made people get more ratings on their radio stations, but the thing that hurt me is when people started to say vicious negative things that didn't happen."
Blige admitted that it took so long to comment on how badly affected her because of how viciously she was attached, she told Martinez.
"I wanted to crawl under the bed," Blige told Martinez. "It was a mistake, but I did it because I thought it was something that wouldn't come out like that. It was sold to us that I would be shot in an iconic way. I was looking for someone to have mercy, but no one had mercy. It was a learning experience. It hurt my feelings. It crushed me for like two days."
