Popular country singer Miranda Lambert offended several fans at her Las Vegas show on Sunday when she paused her set to scold a group of women for taking a selfie.
As Lambert, 39, performed her ballad Tin Man, she abruptly stopped singing to tell the crowd that a group of women posing for a picture were “pissing me off.”
Lambert complained the women were more concerned with taking their selfie than her music.
“I don’t like it at all!” Lambert chastized as concertgoers both booed and applauded the outburst.
She waved her hand at the group of women to sit and stay. Lambert and her band then restarted the song.
Lambert has not commented publicly on the situation.
The scolding from Lambert has inspired fierce debate about whether concert attendees should take selfies during a performance. Some in Lambert’s camp have argued an artist is owed respect and attention during their show.
Others, including the women who took the selfie, said folks should be able to take photos as they please — especially given the astronomical prices of many popular concert tickets right now.
Adela Calin, a Las Vegas-based influencer who posed in the shamed photo alongside her friends, said she was “appalled” by Lambert’s short speech.
“It was 30 seconds at most,” Calin told NBC News. “We took the picture quickly and were going to sit back down.”
Calin uploaded the divisive selfie to Instagram and wrote that she was the target of Lambert’s scolding.
“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,” Calin continued.
She called Lambert’s outburst “uncalled for,” “disrespectful” and said she would boycott all of Lambert’s future performances.
“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 defended.
Fox News reported that some concertgoers left the venue mid-performance after Lambert scolded the group of women.
For a number of other touring musicians, selfie-taking fans have been the least of their concerns. Several of the industry’s biggest musicians, including Harry Styles and Taylor Swift, have in recent months been bombarded with projectiles thrown on stage.
Pop singer Bebe Rexha made headlines in June when she was rushed off stage after she was hit in the face with a fan’s cell phone during a concert.
Rexha was left with a split eyebrow and a dark black eye.