CULTURE

Lorde Recovering After Being Dragged For Unfortunately Chosen Whitney Houston Reference

She was immediately called out on Twitter.

April 6, 2018

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Allow Lorde to be a cautionary tale for remembering to totally think through the implications of what you post online before you post it. On Thursday night, the pop star was forced to take down her most recent Instagram post and upload an apology after Twitter users dragged her for an unfortunate photo-caption combination. The post in question was a serene photo of a fancy bathtub with the faucet on and reading materials at the ready, captioned with, “And iiii will always love you.”

Almost immediately, fans and followers started dragging Lorde on Twitter, since the post appeared to make light of the fact that Whitney Houston, who sang 1992’s hit cover of “I Will Always Love You,” died in 2012 after accidentally drowning in a bathtub. “This is disgusting idk how people find it funny. Whitney was a legend. she was amazing. she was a queen. she was a strong black woman. I like lorde but this is truly disgusting,” one person tweeted.

Others gave the 21-year-old the benefit of the doubt, tweeting that the caption was probably just an unfortunate mistake and that Lorde likely hadn’t been thinking when she attached the excited quote to the photo of her waiting tub. “Lorde is probably sitting in the tub not realizing what she just did,” one fan tweeted.

The latter group appears to have been correct in their predictions that Lorde posted the Whitney lyric without thinking, since the singer took down her post within an hour and owned up to her mistake by uploading a sincere, facepalming apology to her Instagram Story shortly after. “Extremely extremely poorly chosen quote. I’m so sorry for offending everyone – I hadn’t even put this together I was just excited to take a bath. I’m an idiot. Love Whitney forever and ever. Sorry again,” she wrote, adding, “IT IS NOT MY FKN DAY TODAY.” It wasn’t right, but she’s trying to make it okay.