Mariah Carey, the ultimate holiday-season diva, gave an interview with Andy Cohen and Anderson Cooper on New Year's Eve. Cohen and Cooper were standing in Times Square, where a scaled-back New
Year's Eve celebration was taking place and Jennifer Lopez was performing in the background.
That all sounds pretty fine and normal, but the tension and awkwardness was...palpable.
"What's going on in the background? I'm hearing music," Carey said. Cohen responded, "Yeah, we got J.Lo behind us, actually." Carey just smiled through the silence as Cohen tried to move in with his questions.
Honestly, you just have to watch it:
Mariah hearing J.Lo in the background is the perfect conclusion to 2020 pic.twitter.com/kPngJ8SRqj
— Ryan Bloomquist (@ryanbloomquist) January 1, 2021
Let the memes flow:
Mariah Carey"What's Going On At Background I Keep Hearing Music"
Andy"J'Lo Is Doing Her Concert"
???????#CNNNYEpic.twitter.com/8BrphsdI3g
— MrTV_Mmekwa (@MmekwaMrtv) January 1, 2021
I hope everyone saw the moment on CNN tonight when Mariah Carey said “I hear music in the background” and Andy Cohen responded “yeah its J.Lo” and we all retreated into our turtle shells. pic.twitter.com/Rk1aiMfEZD
— badmitten (@whiskeymittens) January 1, 2021
*CNN interviewing Mariah Carey while J Lo performs*
Mariah Carey: What is that noise in the background?
*J Lo stops mid performance*: pic.twitter.com/4KsvhpWrbH
— Weekly Newsical (@WeeklyNewsical) January 1, 2021
So, as all of Twitter is probably aware, Mimi and J.Lo have some history. Carey's famous "I don't know her" line first came about during an early 2000s German TV interview. When she was asked about how she feels about Lopez, she literally said, "I don't know her."
In her 2020 book, The Meaning of Mariah Carey, she referenced Lopez without mentioning her name. She called her "another female entertainer on [Sony] (whom I don't know)."
Carey has never discussed the rumored feud in detail, but she seemed to reference the quote in an interview with the Cut in 2015.
"Well, there was a very interesting shirt that a fan made with a quote that I said years ago that, when I said it, I really wasn’t trying to be funny," she said. "I was just being honest and everybody’s kind of blowing it out of proportion but this guy had a shirt on and it was a picture of me that he made and the quote was underneath it — and I'm going to leave you hanging as to what it was."