The Grammy-winning singer Chrisette Michele keeps her phone switched off, a habit that stems from her long stint in cancellation purgatory. Her brother barely got through last month to relay the news that Snoop Dogg had been DJing at a party for Donald Trump’s second inaugural, and many in the Black community were irate. Longtime fans were calling Snoop a sellout, she learned, and were unfollowing him online by the hundreds of thousands.
Snoop remained defiant in the face of this controversy, which really peeved the hordes who well remember when Snoop was regulating Maga support in the music industry. That defiance “was the thing that resonated with me”, says Michele when I initially reach her the week after Trump’s second inauguration. “We live in a different era where you can say what you think and not feel like you might die.”
In 2017, Michele performed at a Trump inauguration in a shocking break from the music industry’s anti-Maga stance. She was met with considerable backlash from fans and from industry peers including Questlove, the Roots drummer and Tonight Show bandleader. Despite Michele’s extensive success working with rappers Nas and Jay-Z, the decision to perform for Trump cost her future gigs and more opportunities to collaborate with industry heavyweights.
Now that some music stars have hopped on the Maga bandwagon, she can’t help reflecting on the price she paid for making the worst decision of her career. “I just remember sitting in a hotel lobby next to my manager, who was my husband of two years at the time, in tears, thinking, ‘Maybe I’ll just become a professor,’” she recalls. “The constant gnawing and chewing and shouting at me was so difficult.”
You wonder if the outcome might have been different if Michele had a catalog to rival Snoop’s, or even a song as big as Drop It Like It’s Hot. A native of Long Island, New York, Michele, now 42, came to prominence during the neo soul movement of the mid-noughties, following Jill Scott, Erykah Badu and India Arie. Michele’s satin voice, jazzy vibes and overall versatility made her a sought-after hip-hop balladeer by everyone from the Roots to Rick Ross – the latter of whom appeared at last month’s inaugural Crypto Ball alongside Snoop and Soulja Boy. In 2009, Michele earned a performance Grammy for her third single, Be OK, which also featured will.i.am. All the while Michele remained open about the pressures she felt around her body image, becoming a champion of the #BlackGirlMagic movement.
Michele didn’t enter the political arena; it landed on her in 2014, when Michelle Obama turned up for one of her shows outside Washington DC. She was not Michelle Obama that night, Michele recalls, “she was my homegirl. She came backstage and asked for a selfie with her mom and her aunt. She wore pink lipstick – like, happy, girlie pink lipstick. She knew all the words. She was a fan.”
In 2016 Barack Obama added If I Have My Way, a groovy ballad from Michele’s debut album, to his summer playlist. Michele sang for the president at that year’s Democratic national convention and at his final White House state dinner, when the Obamas hosted Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong. She takes patriotic duty seriously and eagerly. “When it comes to singing overseas for the troops or at the DNC, I don’t take it for granted,” says Michele. “I’m proud to be an American, always have been since I was a kid – and that’s a very difficult thing to say as a Black woman.”
When Trump’s team invited her to perform at a 2017 inauguration event, Michele accepted – somewhat naively, as it turns out. She doesn’t support or particularly like the guy and was aware of the potential career ramifications. But she saw the gig as an opportunity to confront Trump and see if he kept the same racist, misogynistic energy in person. Even though there seemed to be some cover on the inauguration event’s performance lineup, which also included the gospel music stars Travis Greene and Tina Campbell (of Mary Mary fame), Michele, because of her more mainstream appeal, became the focus. Michele’s longtime supporters begged her to reconsider the gig. In response to reports that she was receiving at least $250,000 for her appearance – the true fee was closer to $75,000 – Questlove and Talib Kweli, both former collaborators of Michele’s, volunteered to pay her not to perform – which hurt. “Honestly, I had to stop paying attention after a while,” she says.
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The music industry was in no mood to party with Trump when he ran in 2016. Eminem openly criticized his policies. Queen’s Brian May condemned his use of We Are the Champions at the Republican national convention. Elton John turned down an invitation to perform at his 2017 inauguration. But few artists were as stridently anti-Trump as Snoop, a social justice advocate who once characterized the gang violence he grew up around in Los Angeles as a trickle-down effect of Ronald Reagan’s economic policies. Snoop set the rules of engagement, pre-emptively denouncing the Black artists who would perform for Trump’s inaugural as “Uncle Toms” and “jigaboos” – derogatory terms that insinuate a deeper racial betrayal. His 2017 music video for the song Lavender, a heavy-handed Trump allegory, features a society of clowns that is ruled by a character named Ronald Klump, whom he shoots with a toy gun. The video outraged Marco Rubio and other Maga Republicans and had Trump musing about the reaction Snoop might have gotten if he had made a similar video about Barack Obama.
But Snoop’s tune changed in 2021 after Trump pardoned Michael “Harry-O” Harris, co-founder of the Death Row Records label that launched Snoop’s music career. (Harris had been serving a 25-years-to-life sentence for drug trafficking and attempted murder.) “I have nothing but love and respect for Donald Trump,” Snoop said last year. “He has done only great things for me.”
At the Crypto Ball, Snoop was photographed throwing up hand signs with Bo Loudon, a young Maga influencer who is close with Barron Trump; Loudon captioned the picture: “Welcome to Maga, Snoop!” The endorsement effectively consolidated Snoop’s metamorphosis from Murder Was the Case gangsta rapper to ubiquitous pitchman to all-American mascot. Reacting to the Crypto Ball gig, The View’s Ana Navarro likened Snoop to a “trained seal”. Other rappers who have performed for Trump have suffered backlash even as Carrie Underwood and other music industry standard-bearers have capitulated to Maga. (After Nelly performed at a separate inauguration event, the administrator of a popular Instagram page dedicated to his wife, the R&B singer Ashanti, stepped down, citing disappointment with the Hot in Herre rapper – who is also unapologetic.)
Michele processed the scenes of Snoop with Rick Ross and Soulja Boy at last month’s inauguration ball with wonder. “My initial reaction was, ‘Isn’t it nice to see Black men dancing in America so unapologetically?’” she says. When she faced criticism for her own performance, “I guess I wasn’t so masculine in my way of saying, ‘You don’t get to tell me what to do,’” she adds. “I just did what I thought was right. I didn’t shout at anybody and tell them not to say what they think.”
In the main, the reputational damage to these men has been mostly cosmetic. For Snoop, the controversy has simply presented yet another occasion for him to play the part of America’s lovable scamp. Weeks after raising hackles at the inauguration event, he was back on stage for the NFL’s year-end awards show and for a television PSA that ran during the Super Bowl calling on viewers to “stand up to hate,” reigniting criticism of his inauguration appearance. Michele remembers arriving at a Super Bowl party at the Fountainebleau resort in Las Vegas as the ad was airing. “I’m still processing that commercial,” she jokes.
Sometimes Michele thinks an overtly militant defense might have shortened her time in purgatory. “That was the most uncomfortable realization,” she says. “Like, if I’m not shouting and throwing my fist in the air, then it’s quite possible that I get ignored because I’m Black and soft. Look at Amber Rose. She spoke at the RNC, people were hard on her – and she just said, ‘Screw you,’ with that big, beautiful smile on her face. And people just backed up. The funny thing is: I don’t agree with her! I just watched it like, ‘OK, girl …’”
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Michele hoped to make a statement through the inauguration performance itself, but her messages were mixed. She sang a gospel song called Intentional, which calls for an unwavering belief in a divine plan – an argument evangelicals use to justify Trump support. She wore a maxi skirt replete with images of Black torture and subjugation by Jean-Michele Basquiat. In the end Trump didn’t make the performance, and she never got to meet him. By the time she walked off stage after the four-minute gig, “the death threats were starting,” Michele says. “I was afraid.”
She thought she could make them stop if she just took a moment to explain herself – although, she admits, her first instinct was “to be completely silent and just go somewhere and mind my business for four years”. In an open letter pushed on social media, she said she intended her performance to serve as a “bridge” between Trump supporters and opponents. During an appearance on the Breakfast Club, Michele emphasized her Basquiat skirt again while reviewing the other rebellious nuances of her performance. But her attempts at subtlety were ultimately lost on the masses. “That was me overanalyzing everything, overthinking everything,” she says. “Because my parents are teachers, I want everybody to understand all the angles. My shouting came from insecurity, from needing people to believe that I did this for the right reasons.”
By then the blowback against Michele was already fierce and unrelenting. She was dropped by her record label and by Spike Lee – who had one of her songs, Black Girl Magic, slated for the Netflix reboot of She’s Gotta Have It. Industry friends kept their distance. Her marriage eventually fell apart under the strain. The sneaker preacher Jamal Bryant called for a boycott of her music. He’d later apologize, but Trump’s camp never reached out to check on her. “Can you put a note in there asking them to reach out to Chrisette?” she asks me, laughing. “My team is waiting on a follow-up phone call.”
But it was the constant stream of death threats coming through her phone that really pushed Michele into depression and suicidal ideation. “We had security guards at my hotel doors,” says Michele, who also recalls being heckled on stage. “I wasn’t going to the grocery store by myself for years.” In October 2017 she shared that the fallout from her inauguration performance had caused her to suffer a miscarriage – and was further vilified for punctuating the news with a picture that was not of her actual miscarriage. “That was me at my most panicked, the point where I came close to doing anything to get people just to be nice to me for one second,” she says. “I thought people were never going to stop hating me. I didn’t think this would go on for years.”
In a 2018 Facebook post, a year into Trump’s first term and just before the midterm elections, Michele posted a picture of herself between the Obamas and the Singaporean prime minister at the state dinner while calling on voters to rebalance the scales. (“When I look back at this moment it reminds me of what this country’s leadership should look like,” she wrote. “Diplomacy. Civility. Compassion. Love. Integrity. Gangsters don’t run this country. The people do.”) But it just became a reason for critics to come at her harder.
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Michele started treating her phone like a landline, switching it on every now and then for friends and family. “As a person in the public space, you think it’s your job to be connected all the time,” she says. “But it’s incredibly easy to disconnect.”
But even as Black America disavowed Michele, many industry peers rallied around her. “Anita Baker was very vocal about making sure I had her number and about calling her if I needed anything,” she recalls. “India Arie did an entire interview explaining how I should be spoken to as a person, pulled me backstage and shook [the sense back into] me. Kirk Franklin was like: ‘The Black community owes you an apology.’ But Stevie Wonder was the most adamant to me about continuing in this music space because he’s been through so many things himself. These are the people who really wanted to make sure that I knew they were there for me.”
She carried on quietly for years – performing around the country and even launching a podcast called Inner Peace Examination, dedicated to self-reflection – until a curious thing happened: the political winds shifted. Trump stormed back from his 2020 defeat to win re-election, this time with backing from tech billionaires. Corporate America rushed to scrap its DEI programs in a fit of anticipatory obedience. Just last month Obama and Trump were observed chatting warmly to each other while sitting together at Jimmy Carter’s state funeral – as if they hadn’t been mortal enemies for the past 17 years.
Ultimately, Michele wishes she could have been like Snoop and told her critics to kiss off, and she also wishes she had never taken the inauguration gig in the first place. It’s another nuanced position that could threaten her ongoing career recovery and land her in hot water all over again – but at least now Michele knows she’s built for tough times. “For about four or five years, I hated the word resilient,” she says, “because it meant I got cancelled and got back up. But now I embrace it because it means you kept going, and people stuck with you and you’re here now.”
