The Billboard Music Awards returns to the television airwaves tonight after an absence of several years. The show has been retooled somewhat. Now, instead of providing a breakdown of chart feats during the calendar year, the show will now reflect a somewhat vague combination of sales, airplay and a series of social media tools. Performers on the show will include Rihanna, The Black Eyed Peas and Pitbull, with a special achievement award being given to Beyonce Knowles.
Guess what? I won’t be watching. As much as I’d like to live-blog every music awards show that comes on TV, I’ve got plans and will unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) miss the show. However, I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge it’s stature as one of the major award shows out there by posting a clip from a previous ceremony. We’ll go with the 1993 show, which was hosted by Phil Collins (whose dry British humor didn’t exactly go over well with the crowd, especially when he made a comment following a Dr. Dre/Snoop Dogg performance that some mistakenly construed as racist.) He also had the misfortune to host the show during a year when one of the performances was 4 Non Blondes’ rendition of their lone hit “What’s Up?”
Long story short-I hate this song. I don’t hate it as much as, say, “Macarena” or “Mambo #5”, but it would certainly be in line with those unfortunate ditties on a list of Worst Songs of the Nineties. Add in Linda Perry’s wanna-be-grunge look, and hell, I can barely watch this clip. Thankfully, the Blondes disappeared from the scene immediately after, and lead singer Perry was reborn almost a decade later as a pop songsmith for the likes of Pink and Christina Aguilera. However, I don’t know if a million 21st century pop classics can make up for this travesty.