Iconic rapper and entertainment mogul Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter gave the acceptance speech everyone was talking about during Sunday night’s Grammy Awards in Los Angeles. While he was not up for any awards in the various competitive fields in 2024, the Brooklyn, NY native was honored with the Dr. Dre Global Impact Award during the televised ceremony at Crypto.com Arena.

Joined onstage by his daughter, Blue Ivy Carter, Jay used his powerfully crafted acceptance speech to show love to a visibly grateful Dr. Dre, touch on the Recording Academy‘s historically rocky relationship with rap, ask some tough questions on behalf of his wife, Beyoncé, and drop a few biting yet light-hearted truth bombs on the gathering of industry elites.

“I used to say [the Grammy statue] is a sippy cup for Blue,” he began, his pre-teen daughter watching from his side. “But Blue’s grown up now, she doesn’t take sippy cups. And she has her own Grammys.”

After thanking Dre, along with Run DMC, for “showing us we can be rockstars,” he offered the crowd a little Grammy history lesson. “How far we’ve come, with Will Smith and Jazzy Jeff … winning their first Grammy in ’89 and boycotting because it wasn’t televised. And then they went to, like, a hotel and watched the Grammys. I ain’t even understand what the…” he laughed, “It wasn’t a great boycott.

“But then, [in ’99] I took a page out of their book. I was nominated for Best Rap Album and DMX had dropped two albums that year, they both were number one—shoutout to DMX—and he wasn’t nominated at all, so I boycotted,” he continued, a sheepish smile creeping across his face, “and I watched the Grammys…” That night, he won Best Rap Album for Vol 2… Hard Knock Life despite his absence from the ceremony.

Jay continued, seemingly speaking for musicians as a whole, “I’m just saying, we just want y’all to get it right. We love y’all, we love y’all, we love y’all. We want y’all to get it right. At least get it close to right.”

As applause picked up in response to that sentiment, Jay brushed off the crowd reaction (“Y’all don’t gotta clap at everything”) and continued, “Obviously it’s subjective because, you know, it’s music and it’s opinion-based, but you know…”

Referencing his wife in the audience, he added, “I don’t want to embarrass this young lady but she has more Grammys than everyone and never won Album of the Year, so even by your own metrics, that doesn’t work. Think about that. Most Grammys, never won Album of the Year. That doesn’t work.”

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The hard truths kept coming from there. “Some of you gonna go home tonight and feel like you’ve been robbed. Some of you may get robbed. Some of you don’t belong in the category.” When that comment was met with a mix of cheers and “ooohhs,” HOV laughed, “Nah, nah, nah, nah. That was, uh… When I get nervous, I tell the truth.”

“But outside of that, we gotta keep showing up. And forget the Grammys for a second. Just in life—as my daughter sits and stares at me nervous as I am,” he added as he took Blue’s hand amid laughter from he crowd, “Just in life, you gotta keep showing up. Just keep showing up … until they give you all those accolades you feel you deserve, until they call you ‘chairman,’ until they call you a genius, until they call you the greatest of all time. You feel me?”

Below, watch Jay-Z accept his Global Impact Award at the Grammy Awards—and use it as a sippy cup himself.

Jay-Z Acceps Dr. Dre Global Impact Award at Grammy Awards – 2/4/24