India Arie to Pull Music and Podcast Off Spotify in Protest of Joe Rogan's Rhetoric

Grammy-award winning songstress India Arie is the latest celeb to join Neil Young and Joni Mitchell in protest of Spotify’s relationship with Joe Rogan.

According to Hip-HopDX, Arie made the announcement in a post to social media on Monday, explaining her decision to “walk through” the door Young opened and why she finds Rogan’s rhetoric problematic.

“I wonder who else is tired,” Arie captioned.

“I have decided to pull my music and podcast from Spotify,” the post read. “Neil Young opened a door that I must walk through. I believe in freedom of speech. However, I find Joe Rogan problematic for reasons other than his Covid interviews. For me, its also his language around race. What I am talking about is respect, who gets it and who doesn’t. Paying musicians a fraction of a penny and him $100M? This shows the type of company they are and the company that they keep. I’m tired.”

Though its unclear what instance Arie’s specifically referencing in regards to Rogan’s “race language,” the podcast host recently came under fire for his ignorant comments about Black Americans just last week,

As previously reported by The Root, in a recent episode of his The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, the eponymous host said:

“There’s such a spectrum of shades of people. Unless you’re talking to someone who is, like, 100 percent African, from the darkest place, where they are not wearing any clothes all day and they’ve developed all that melanin to protect themselves from the sun, you know, even the term Black is weird. When you use it for people who are literally my color, it becomes very strange,”

This prompted a rebuttal from many, including The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah who mocked Rogan’s sentiment during his show.

Newsweek has more:

After playing a clip of the exchange, Noah looked at his hands in feigned shock as he quipped: “Oh my God! I’m not Black! I’m not Black! Joe Rogan’s right! I’m like a Caramel Mocha Frappuccino. This changes everything. This changes everything!”

He then ran off screen, prompting the sound of police sirens to play on the set.

Returning to his desk, Noah then informed his audience: “The police said I’m Black. But yeah, apparently Joe Rogan really wants to know why they say ‘Black people’ if they’re not the color of a Sharpie.”

Before ending the bit, Noah then reminded Rogan and the audience of where the origins of calling African-Americans Black came from (spoiler alert: it didn’t come from us) and implored folks to remember the absurdities of the ruled that they (read: white folks) created:

“White people got there [to Africa], and they were like, ‘Wow. There’s a lot of Black people here. A lot of Black people.’ Then in America, they invented a rule that if you had one drop of Black blood in you, that makes you Black—which defined how you were treated by the government and by society.”

*Deep, heavy, Negro spiritual sigh*

Spotify, y’all sure y’all wanna keep this guy around?