Miranda Lambert has come under fire after she paused a concert to call out fans in the audience who were taking selfies.
The country music singer was doing a show at the Bakkt Theater at Planet Hollywood in Las Vegas over the weekend, Newsweek reported. She had just launched into an acoustic performance of her 2016 hit, "Tin Man," when she halted the song.
"I'm going to stop right here for a second; I'm sorry," she said. "These girls are worried about their selfie and not listening to the song. It's p****ng me off a little bit. I don't like it — at all. We're here to hear some country music, and I'm singing some country damn music."
One of the fans whom Lambert criticized accused the singer of trying to make her look "young, immature, and vain."
"It felt like I was back at school with the teacher scolding me for doing something wrong and telling me to sit down back in my place," Adela Calin told NBC News. "I feel like she was determined to make us look like we were young, immature, and vain. But we were just grown women in our 30s to 60s trying to take a picture."
Calin said that her group of friends, who were seated very close to the stage, tried to take photos before the show started, but the lighting was poor. As a result, they asked the woman behind them to take a photo of them and their friends towards the end of the show.
"We just couldn't get one good picture," she explained. "We were so excited because I think we had the best seats in the house in the whole theater."
Calin noted that it took "30 seconds at most" to take the photo.
"We took the picture quickly and were going to sit back down," she recalled.
A video of the incident went viral on TikTok, where many users rallied to defend Calin and her friends.
"She could have finished her song and just said some blanket statement like, 'Let's try to be in the moment and stay off our phones' if she felt like she needed to," one person commented on the TikTok video.
"This was completely uncalled for, and disrespectful to her fan base. They paid their money and was enjoying the music," a Twitter user stated.
Lambert rose to prominence after she finished third in the reality competition "Nashville Star" in 2003. She has since won multiple awards, including Grammys, and is the most awarded artist in Academy of Country Music history.
Zoe Papadakis ✉
Zoe Papadakis is a Newsmax writer based in South Africa with two decades of experience specializing in media and entertainment. She has been in the news industry as a reporter, writer and editor for newspapers, magazine and websites.
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