Sabrina Carpenter appeared to be in hot water with BBC Radio 1 after the singer’s performance was taken down, edited, and later re-uploaded on the company’s YouTube page.
For context, BBC Radio 1’s edit of Carpenter’s performance stemmed from a lyric she ad-libbed during her set. The 23-year-old’s debut performance at Radio 1’s Live Lounge occurred last week on Feb. 23. In it, the Carpenter gave a live rendition of Harry Styles’ hit song “Late Night Talking” before singing her latest single, “Nonsense.” Although Carpenter’s first song went without a hitch, her second performance is what sparked the controversy.
While performing “Nonsense” — a song for which Carpenter would customize new outro lyrics live to match the environment, according to Capital FM — the former Disney Channel star decided to use the company’s name and compare it to male genitalia. She improvised, “How quickly can you take your clothes off, pop quiz. I’m American. I am not British. So BBC, it stands for something different. This live lounge is so lit because I’m in it, in it.”
Despite Carpenter’s quip, Uproxx reports that BBC, the acronym for the venerable British Broadcasting Corporation, would post the live performance on Feb. 24 on YouTube only to immediately remove it. Days later, after making the edits, the company would re-upload the video on its platform.
Although Carpenter has yet to respond to the changes, the Girl Meets World star opened up about the inspiration behind the lyrics to “Nonsense.” During an interview with Apple Music, Carpenter mentioned that despite the track’s overall message being about love and relationships, the lyrics, especially the outro, consisted of some of her favorite verses where she could show her “sense of humor.” She said,
“Genuinely, [I] just could not stop writing fake versions of the chorus…Basically, we were, like, we know the song is nonsense, we know the chorus, so we took a few of those lyrics that we love, that we were dying over, and we put them in the outro of the song. It’s cool that that kinda song was able to make it in the record, because I really think that also it shows my stupid sense of humor.”
No additional information has been released at this time.