Lily Allen has taken to social media to combat the flogging of “nepo babies” after an extensive New York Magazine cover story was released breaking down the oft-debated concept.
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For those of you that do not frequent TikTok, “nepo baby,” refers to the children of celebrities who have a leg up in the entertainment industry thanks to nepotism – Your Hadids. Your Kardashians.
Author of the cover story Nate Jones explained, “Aghast, content creators got to work. An unwieldy phrase — ‘the child of a celebrity’ — was reduced to a catchy buzzword: nepo baby. TikTokers produced multipart series about nepo babies who resembled their famous parents, exposés on people you didn’t know were nepo babies (everyone knew), and PSAs urging celebrity parents to roast their nepo babies ‘to keep them humble.'”
The cover story went equally as viral as the topic itself prompting Allen, a “nepo baby” herself, to take to social media with a statement.
“The nepo babies y’all should be worrying about are the ones working for legal firms, the ones working for banks, and the ones working in politics, If we’re talking about real world consequences and robbing people of opportunity,” Allen wrote on Twitter. “BUT that’s none of my business.”
She later added, “And before you come at me for being a nepo baby myself, I will be the first to tell you that I literally deserve nothing.”
Her comments seemed to have the opposite effect than she intended with several users hitting back at the singer. One user, @the_mod_woman simply responded by saying “We can multitask,” rendering her comments moot.
Allen followed up soon after by saying, “Look, I seem to have riled people up with my comments about nepo babies. I am nearly 40 years of age and am more than happy, in fact I think it’s important to disclose what a privileged upbringing I’ve had and how that has created so many opportunities for me.”
“I mention my age because I haven’t always been able to have that conversation, in my twenties I felt very defensive about it, I felt like I worked extremely hard and that I deserved the success that I had,” she said. “People connected to my songs and that the songs came from me, I also had quite a fraught relationship with some of my family members so it felt difficult for me to attribute my successes to them, at the time.”
She then went on to comment on the “severe lack of representation in the industry” where class and race are concerned. “Everyone loses as a result,” said Allen.
She summed up her thoughts with, “I do feel that nepo babies are being somewhat scapegoated here though, there is a wider, societal conversation to be had about wealth inequality, about lack of programs and funding, and I guess that was the point I was trying to make, maybe badly.”
Photo by Joseph Okpako/WireImage
