June 28th, 2010

Any real fan of my site for the amount of time it's been online should know of my well-documented beef with the BET network. It's a constant insult to my intelligence with the shows they air (Tiny & Toya, anyone?) and is just a general embarrassment to my race that they continue to market themselves to the lowest common denominator demographic-- 14 year-old wannabe pretty boy thugs who think saying "I dun knows hows ta reads" is giving them street cred. in an era where we're lucky enough, for the first and most likely last time, to have a black man in office. Fuck BET.

Yet, me and everyone else who hates it continues to watch this drivel. I think it's because we like watching train wrecks unfold before our eyes so we can have something to overload Twitter and Facebook with.

And that's exactly what the past editions of the BET Awards have been; got-damn 9/11-sized disasters that were broadcast on television. You think an awards ceremony that stretches back to 2000 would call it quits after, hmm, nine years of terrible (turrible) attempts, but I here we are again at the 10th annual BET Awards (which aired on June 27, 2010). This is actually the first time I've bothered to go out my way to recap the event. Usually, the show's so bad, me writing an article about it would stretch ten pages (my report on the 2006 VMAs -- which is offline now, was pushin' double digit pages. Don't try me!) so I don't even bother. Does this mean this year's had some redeeming qualities? No. It still sucked, it was just less sucky by BET standards.

I caught the tail end of the pre-show. If you missed it, you didn't miss out on anything other than Terrence J. and Rocsi being their usual annoying selves and Nick Cannon sucking his own dick. Soulja Boy performed "Pretty Boy Swag" at the end of it, which has to be one of the laziest songs he's ever put out -- and I've had the unfortunate pleasure of hearing his entire library of garbage. Atleast he's not wearing night gowns as shirts anymore, right?

His new lackey, Roscoe Dash of "All The Way Turnt Up" fame, was also on hand looking ridiculously ghetto with that BET logo cut into his hair and spraypainted. How the hell you gonna take the time to do that and end up using the network's OLD logo? C'mon man, I know you got Google Images! Pay attention, nigga!

Queen Latifah hosted the main festivities, which I honestly didn't mind through out the night. She joked about being the absolute "last choice" for BET, while going through a fake list of celebs who turned down the gig. One of them, much to my delight, was Steve Urkel. Yes, Urkel, not Jaleel White. Damn, you know your career wasn't worth half a shit when nobody even bothers to call you your real name anymore, SMH.

In my opinion, White doing the hosting job would have been infinitely more entertaining, especially if he stayed in character the entire night complete with the high water pants, suspenders, and full on geek wear. He could have done a whole opening bit where he and several back up dancers do the Urkel Dance and have it remixed by a similarly dressed Soulja Boy half way through. Then he could drink some cool juice out of a Ciroc bottle donated by Diddy, come back as Stefan Urquelle, and do some T.I. parody. Later on in the night he could put up a picture of Drake from high school (because he looked a hot mess) and be like "Oh, I remember him. He got stuffed in lockers right next to me. Hey Drake, do you have any... cheeeeeeese?"

God, somebody get me a job at BET as a director!

It really looked like BET got a damn budget to work with this year. I'm so used to MTV blowing them out of the water presentation wise, I have to say they stepped it up after finally upgrading to HD (them tooth picks and duct tape show up clear in high def!). I was pleased with how a lot of the performances were done, but I was starting to get annoyed at the abuse of the smoke machine. I don't even think it was dry ice it was blowing, either. Nah, for everyone to use the effect, it had to be weed smoke. Lil' Wayne probably donated BET his warehouse supply of kush before he went to jail to get some kind of tax write off.

Kanye West opened the show with his new song "Power," which I'm assuming is from his upcoming "Good Ass Job" album. Being the first time I've heard it after so many blogs have hyped the leaked version up so much, I have to say I'm not impressed with it. I mean, it's typical Kanye, but I wasn't blown away like I was with his first "Love Lockdown" performance at the 2008 VMAs. It'll grow on me, but meh. Funny he started off the night and wasn't seen or heard from again the rest of the evening. BET figured they gotta get Kanye on before he gets too drunk and starts to act a fool again, huh?

The best performance of the show was the Michael Jackson tribute from..... Chris Brown. I hate him, but I gotta give the devil his due. He killed it for sure, but he needs to fire his manager because he's a year late on this and I have no idea why he wasn't at last year's mega schmega tribute. Sure, homeboy was having some issues, but if you're doing a MJ tribute show, it's plain slack not to have Brown on it, no matter what the surrounding circumstances are. He's the closet thing this generation has to Jackson as far as raw telent goes in the dancing arena. In the four or so minutes he was dancing and crying on stage, the world basically forgave him for knockin' Rihanna senseless. Amazing the voodoo this kid has.

I bet Ol' Fivehead was screamin' "AW HELL NAH!" in her Mickey Mouse helmet after reading the positive response her ex-boo was getting online. Seriously, that's all you gotta do to get back in black folk's good graces?! O.J. Simpson should have did this shit years ago, then. If Balrog had done this last year, maybe his last album wouldn't have flopped so bad. For the time being, he's back to his former glory, but the jury's still out how long he can keep this up.