Black people are famous for so many things and one thing we rightly deserve credit for is loyalty to our brand. We rioted for Rodney King, we exulted the election of Barack Obama, and every year we take over Twitter to chronicle every minute of the BET Awards. Rodney King is dead, so he gets a pass. Plus, he did say something important even though we failed to understand it. Obama is disappointing; still the alternative is frightening so we need to vote and continue to hope. But BET? Well, writer Holly Bass wrote a Washington City Paper article way back in 1996 called “Why BET Sucks” and guess what? She was right then, and today in 2012; BET may suck less but its signature offering, The BET Awards, is a prime example of what she was talking about. Still, we remain loyal; tuning in every year in hopes it will be something more than an overly scripted plastic orgy of insider self-congratulatory waste of two plus hours on a Sunday evening. It never is….
Now, while I’m always happy to skip Nicki Minaj, I didn’t see D’Angelo or what I’m told was a decent tribute to Donna Summer. Maybe those moments would have colored my opinion a bit. But my criticism isn’t about the music; it’s about the production and about the mindset behind it. Anyway, how are you not going to schedule D’Angelo to close the show? You close with “Rack City”? My criticism is about being left with a feeling that on an evening purportedly celebrating Black music the most important equation in its remarkable resilience and success, the fans, are treated with the most indifference.
BET is still hustling us, still pulling up in a Plymouth and depending on us believing it’s a Lexus. Viewers aren’t invited to celebrate, they’re granted permission to watch people they’ve made celebrities engage in often boorish, almost always awkward, sometimes perplexing behavior. “… We want them (the artists) to have a good time in a protected atmosphere,” Stephen G. Hill, BET’s president of music programming and specials told the Washington Post in an interview. “It’s like a family gathering. When we call artists they know our goal is to make them shine. They trust us.”
Maybe he should focus on protecting viewers from variations of the same tired theme every year, but BET, corporately owned by Viacom, imagines itself to be the arbiter of Black cultural exceptionalism, the gatherer of an A-list, which, if you only give it a small bit of thought, is the antithesis of hip hop, or should be. What we are left with is not a real show celebrating music, but a musical reality show with fake spontaneity, fake sing-alongs, and fake personalities in the audience, waiting for a cue that the camera is pointed in their direction. No disrespect but don't ask Lil Wayne about Frankie Beverly, don't cut the camera to Beyonce when Chaka Khan is performing, and what does Kim Khardasian have to do with music? In a venue that seats 6300 people we got repeated audience shots of the same folks all night long. As Holly Bass wrote, “It’s not that BET is evil, it’s just so… completely whack.”