2022 Billboard Music Awards (GMR, Billboard, NBC-TV, aired May 15, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On May 15 at 8 p.m. I turned on NBC for the 2022 Billboard Music Awards, which have been going on for quite some time (if I can make things out from their Wikipedia page, the awards were first given out in 1992 and first telecast in 2007) and, unlike the Grammy Awards, are determined by so-called “inteactions” between the artists and the audience: music sales (this being 2022, as measured by downloads and streams as well as physical sales), radio play and live performances. The show’s host was rapper Sean Combs, a.k.a. Puff Daddy, a.k.a. P. Diddy and now just Diddy – and if I thought Snoop Dogg was a repulsive presence that significantly hampered my enjoyment of the American Song Contest, Diddy was even worse – and because he was one of the show’s producers in addition to its host, the talent list was also a lot more rap-heavy than the American Song Contest had been. Diddy also performed the opening number, a typical piece of rap nonsense called (as near as I could make out, since almost no song titles were announced in advance) “Get In the Bag, Stay In the Bag,” which segued into another song which I think was called “We Won’t Stop,” which featured two guest stars that at least livened things up from Diddy’s ramblings, a white rapper and a Black woman singer with a quite nice soul voice.

After the first actual award presentation – to Doja Cat for Best R&B Artist (this was one of those “awards” shows where the actual awards seem like an afterthought) came a nice piece of inoffensive pop by the band Silk Sonic that appeared to be called “I Wi9ll Be Your Righteous Lover.” and then what I believe was an act called POOLCLVB (one word, all caps,and with a “v” instead of a “u” in “club”) doing a song called “Love Track” (well, there had to be something the O’Jays’ “Love Train” would run on!) even though the only lyric seemed to be something like “You make me feel my love again.” The next artist up was someone named Rauw Alejandro (I’m presuming he’s Latino because of his name and because his two songs were both in Spanish – and I wasn’t eben about to try to guess their titles – but “Rauw” is a new Hispanic first name on me)m after which the Top Rock Artist award went to Glass Animals, whole British-accented lead singer joked about how little their music actually has to do with rock. (If they’d been around in the 1960’s or 1970’s they’d have been considered pop, not rock.) The next performers were Florence + the Machine (the word “and” is so 20th century in band names) playing a song whose title sounded to me like “I Didn’t Kno\w Where to Put My Love,” though their Wikipedia page suggests it’s simply called “My Love.” (Well, at least it’s a better song than Paul McCartney’s “My Love,” one of the most terrible songs he’s ever written and one in which he drowned what could have been an O.K. ballad in the same sort of gloppy string arrangement he’d earlier complained about Phil Spector putting on his very similar Beatles song, “The Long and Winding Road.”)

Then, after another interruption in the performance schedule to present an actual award – to Dan + Shay for Best Country Duo or Group – Elle King and Miranda Lambert did a quirky duet called “I’m Drink and I Don’t Want to Go Home.” The song features a bartender who realizes both women are too drunk to drive on the roads, so he confiscates their keys. It’s a fun song, and goodness knows drinking is one of the A-Number-1 themes of country music, but somehow I expect more from Miranda Lambert, who had the good sense to break up with Blake Shelton and the even better sense to write and record a Grammy Award-winning Album of the Year about it. (I can hardly wait for the masterpiece Gwen Stefani will probably give us after she breaks up with him.) After that came a song from a large, heavy-set Black woman whom I thought was rap star Megan Thee Stallion but who turned out to be Teyana Taylor, doing a song called “Tell Me How You Want It” – or, rather, doing just the parts that didn’t have to be censored on network television because the whole song is way too raunchy and sexually explicit for airplay on American radio or TV. The next performer was by far the best of the night: country singer Morgan Wallen who did two songs in a stripped-down style – just two guitars, bass and drums with no frou-frou (no pedal steel guitar or violin, and no blasting rock instruments either) called “I Don’t Think Jesus Did It That Way” and “Wasted on You.”

The next artist was Megan Thee Stallion – the real one – a big but well-proportioned Black woman wearing as little as she coud get away with on network television and doing a hot two-song medley. There are a lot of things I like about Megan Thee Stallion, including her willingness to take pride in her size instead of trying to slim down to the dimensions of a concentration-camp survivor, her chutzpah in naming herself after a male horse, and her use of “Thee” as a middle name (as I’ve said here before, if you’re going to use a variant spelling of “the,” “thee” is a lot more appealing than “tha”!), but I don’t think I’d like just listening to her as much as I enjoy watching her perform and seeing just how athletic her body is. After that was Dan + Shay doing an O.K. song called (I think) “I’ve GotYou for the Rest of My Days.” It was a perfectly nice piece of pop music but it certainly didn’t sound particularly country! Afterwards Janet Jackson, looking very much like middle-period Michael in drag and wearing the kind of bashed-in top hat that was once associated with Harpo Marx, came out to present the Icon Award to Mary J. Blige, who gave an interminable speech after tributes from various other Black women artists, including H.E.R. (one of my favorites).

The next performer was Travis Scott with a two-song medley, “Cover Your Eyes” and “Never Been Lost,” and afterwards neo-punk singer Machine Gun Kelly did a surprisingly beautiful ballad which he said was about his wife and their unborn child. According to Billboard’s own post about the show (https://www.billboard.com/music/awards/megan-thee-stallions-face-best-memes-2022-billboard-music-awards-1235071274/), this was a surprise because it had been publicly known that he and actress Megan Fox were a couple but not that they were legally married or expecting a baby (and given what the United States Supreme Court is about to do to Roe v. Wade any mention of a fetus as an “unborn child” is going to send chills down my spine!). Only the blasting instrumental break at the end of Kelly’s lyrlcal ballad sounded at all like punk rock. The next song was Ed Sheeran piped in live from Belfast (doing an outdoor concert in daylight) singing a song called “Two-Stepping with the One I Love” that for once in his career was fast, peppy and not drowning in its own sentimentality. The next performer was Becky G, who I’m assuming is Latina despite her Anglo name because she did a song in Spanish, “Baila con Me” (do I really have to explain that this means “Dance with Me”?)

Then Maxwell did a 40th anniversary tribute to Michael Jackson’s Thriller (has it really been that long?) with the last and one of the least-known songs on it, “The Lady in My Life.” Then, after Diddy put on a woman who’s under contract to his record label for a brief snippet of a song, the final artist was Nigerian singer/rapper Burna Boy with yet another two-song medley, “Shiloh” (also called “English Have Breakfast”) and “Kalume” (also called “Back Where You Came From”). As throughout this article, these guesses as to the titles might be way off, given that they’re based on my guesses during the show as recorded by me in my chicken-scratch handwriting, but I liked the infectious percussion. Still, easily the best part of the show was a segment that had nothing to do with music: the “Changemaker Award” given to Mari Copeny, who as a nine-year-old girl ini 2014 wrote a letter to then-President Barack Obama pleading with him to help the citizens of Flint, Michigan – most of them, like Copeny herself (and Obama, for that matter), African-American – who had just been poisoned by a Republican state government who had shifted the city’s water supply from the relatively clean Lake Michigan to the horribly polluted Flint River just to save a few bucks. The Flint water crisis became a cause célèbre nationwide not only because it was a horrible monstrosity that inflicted heavy damage on the still developing brains of Flint’s children but also because it was man-made and totally preventable.

On her Web site, https://www.maricopeny.com, as “on the front lines helping kids to embrace their power through equal opportunity. When the Flint Water Crisis began in Flint instead of feeling helpless Mari decided to use her voice to help out her community and to fight for the kids in Flint. Since then she has expanded her effort to help communities across the nation dealing with toxic water.” It quotes Copeny herself as saying, “My generation will fix this mess of a government. Watch us.” Copeny got to take the stage in the same green outfit she’s wearing on her Web page photo and, in an awards show otherwise devoid of political or social commentary (save for a pre-credits title expressing sorrow over the weekend’s mass shootings in Buffalo, New York and Laguna Woods, California), she gave a blistering speech critiquing everything from the global climate crisis to the U.S. Supreme Court’s impending evisceration not only of Roe v. Wade but the entire notion that the U.S. Constitution guarantees people a right to privacy, and in particular the right to make their own decisions about how they have sex, with whom and how tney may deal with the consequences therefrom, both good and bad. I didn’t think a young woman just at the edge of her sexual maturity would have to deal with the possibility of legally enforced motherhood, but there you are: thanks to a long campaign by crabbed old men from rural states who think they know better than the rest of us how we should live and reproduce (or not), the U.S. is about to become one of the most reactionary countries in the world im terms of how it deals with women and what sorts of opportunities they have – and Mari Copeny is finding herself in the cross-hairs of that counter-revolutiion in ways her parents probably had no idea what would happen. It will take the people of her generation to figure out how to undo all the harm those radical Right-wing creeps are doing – assuming the crash-and-burn energy policies they’re insisting on don’t destroy the entire planet’s ability to sustain human life.