I’ll get to the bit of drama surrounding her visit in a minute, but first, let me give props for Ashanti for that show she put on Saturday night at The Pageant. People give her credit for making hits, but she has been dragged for dear life the past 15 years with opinions about her singing skills and performance capacity. If I’m keeping it real, I was low-key prepared to hate. She made that impossible after singing and dancing the stage down. I promise she came to St. Louis with something to prove. I thoroughly enjoyed it and felt bad for not giving her enough due as a performer as she twerked and twirled her way through her Murder Inc. hits. She had smoke, confetti, backup dancers (even though the high-cut, silver thong leotard was giving one of them all sorts of wardrobe malfunction) and a space-age pimpin’ hooded cape that was giving me everything. I also want to give props to NYC native Lydia Caesar for a cute little opening performance that she powered through despite a few little technical difficulties.
Ashanti’s revenge. I knew when I got wind that Nelly’s daddy, Cornell Haynes Sr. was in the mix backstage at The Pageant, that it would not end well. I figured somebody would sneak a photo, it would leak and all you know what would break loose. Ashanti posting a video describing Mr. Haynes’ cat daddy suit he was wearing on the ‘gram was not the exposé I was expecting. Either way, Nelly went in on Twitter and Instagram to let the world know that he was cutting his father off financially. Now here we are days later, and folks are still going back-and-forth about Nelly putting his dad on blast for showing up there and not to his sports games or high school graduation. I’m not about to try to unpack Nelly and his father’s relationship, because that’s between them. What I will say though, is that I feel like Ashanti had at least a taste of “get back” in mind when she booked the gig. She came here to give the show of her career, get Nelly in his feelings and bounce off to the BET Awards and get about the business of living her best life. There is no longer any evidence that she was ever in St. Louis on her social channels because her work here is done. I don’t want to say that she intentionally started a family feud, or an ugly social media spat, but she knows Nelly well enough to know that he would be extremely bothered and feel betrayed by his dad showing up. And she was the one who posted about his presence. I honestly wish that the other parties involved in the drama had peeped the big picture and not given her the public display of revenge she clearly longed for – especially those who inserted themselves in the drama by jumping in against the show’s promoter. There might also be a backstory between these two, but there is a line – and saying you wish that somebody’s cancer returns and causes their death and cussing out the person’s deceased mother on Facebook definitely crosses it.
