Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty
Diane Warren woke up and chose violence on Monday when she took to Twitter and asked, “How can there be 24 writers on a song?” And though she accented her question with a conspicuous eye-roll emoji, she insisted in a follow-up tweet, “This isn’t meant as shade, I’m just curious.”
While Warren didn’t call out anyone by name, the Beyhive promptly began swarming her, presuming the legendary songwriter was referencing “Alien Superstar,” a standout track from Beyoncé’s seventh studio album Renaissance, which happens to have 24 credited writers.
The virtual assault on Warren was quick, stinging, and occasionally just plain mean, with some Beyoncé fans trying to offer “helpful” primers on the business of song samples, and others just outright bullying her. To her favor—or maybe to her detriment, depending on how you view Twitter spats—Warren tried to spar back, bragging that “that’s 23 more” writers than are credited on her songs, which she famously writes alone. But after the initial onslaught, she attempted to quell the madness, conceding in another tweet, “Ok, it’s prob samples that add up the ammount of writerrs.”