by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night CBS-TV presented the 2020 Black Entertainment Television (BET) awards show — the first one I’ve seen since the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic upended the world and suddenly banned large gatherings of people under the same roof (unless you’re President Trump, who can hold all the large gatherings he wants and subject people to viral exposure while having them sign a release that they won’t sue him if they get it) — and given that it took place in the middle of not only the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic but also the turmoil over the George Floyd killing and the sheer number of police murders of unarmed Black people and other people of color, the show buzzed with righteous anger that came forth mostly from the rappers on the program. Once again I’m forced to rely on my hastily scribbled notes to determine who performed what and what the songs’ titles were — unlike the producers of the Global Citizen telecast, the people in charge of this one didn’t bother with chyrons telling you who the perfomers were or what their songs were called — but the show actually had a host, a raucous Black woman stand-up artist named Amanda Seales who threw out a lot of anti-racist zingers, some of which were well targeted and some of which weren’t. The opening number was by a rapper named (I think) Kreton Bryant, who did something I presume was called “I Just Want to Live (God Protect Me),” which segued into a cover of Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” (a lot less appealing with the full panoply of noises that back rap songs than it had been on the ABC-TV special from 2017 rebroadcast last June 24 when it was just read and I could appreciate it as racially charged poetry without having to strain to hear the words through the din of various “scratching” sound effects and “sampling” that back most rap records and all too often drown out the words) by original Public Enemy Chuck D. and, of all people, Ice-T. I had an “Is that … ?” moment when I first recognized his voice and then his face, completing his bizarre career trajectory from being a rapper whose most famous song was “Cop Killer” to playing a cop in his long-running role on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and now once again playing the voice from the ’hood denouncing law enforcement for how it targets Black people.
Then came a performer whose name I wrote down as Ronnie Riggs doing something called “All I Really Want to Know” and John Legend finding a reserve of raw power I never suspected he had in him on a song called “We Will Never Break.” Most awards shows are retrospectives of the past year, but this one was immediate; the up side of the way the artists were obliged to create music videos of their appearances instead of being able to perform “live” is they were able to create new songs for the show, and not surprisingly a lot of the material touched on SARS-CoV-2, police murders of Black people, or both. Indeed, so much of the material was socially conscious it was surprising whenever an artist came on and did a song that wasn’t! Next up was a number by Masego called “Queen Tings” which I recall as a surprisingly lyrical fusion of singing and rapping (a lot of rappers these days are incorporating actual musical pitches, doing a form of Black Sprechsgesang that, at least to me, makes them more tolerable than out-and-out rappers, especially since the people who do that tend to use actual live instruments as their backing instead of the insane burbles, scratches and other noises that traditionally accompany rap.) After that a brother act named Dr. Snake and Sir — one sings, one raps — did “We Need to Let Go” with a quite nice vocal contribution by a woman who turned out to be Jolene Brosche (once again I’m only guessing at a lot of these names since they weren’t shown as chyrons on the screen), Dr. Snake’s wife.
Then came one of the most surprisingly appealing numbers all night, a video shot by Megan Thee Stallion (well, if you’re going to deliberately misspell “The,” “Thee” is considerably nicer than “Tha”!) on a desert location; Megan Thee Stallion is a heavy-set big-breasted Black woman and her video, to a song called “Hot Girl,” looked like legendary 1960’s nudie director Russ Meyer decided to remake Mad Max with an all-Black cast — but she’s a highly charismatic performer and I really liked her clip. Then someone or something named Roddy Ricch, who may or may not have been the same person I had earlier identified as “Ronnie Riggs,” performing a social-comment song called “Rock Star” and did a video in which he’s carrying a gun and defying the police; later he won Album of the Year for a release called Please Excuse Me for Being Antisocial, beating out more highly regarded artists like Beyoncé and Lizzo. The next number was a real surprise: Jennifer Hudson doing a cover of Aretha Franklin’s cover of Nina Simone’s “Young, Gifted and Black” (itself inspired by Lorraine Hansberry, who coined the phrase in the first place!); apparently she’s just starred in a biopic of Aretha, Respect, though it’s one of those movies that’s making its debut on a streaming channel now that movie theatres are things of the past. The trailer for Respect didn’t seem promising — Aretha and another Black woman are discussing that she’s had four albums released and hasn’t yet had a hit, suggesting that the filmmakers are taking a print-the-legend “take” on her early years at Columbia Records (yes, she did put out a lot of dreck on Columbia before switching to Atlantic in 1967 and finally breaking through to stardom, but she made some great records there, too, especially the ones on which John Hammond, who signed her to the label in the first place, actually produced her personally: her 1961 record “Maybe I’m a Fool” sounds just like — and every bit as good as — the ones that finally “broke” her at Atlantic six years later) — but Hudson seems perfectly cast as the Queen of Soul (the second Queen of Soul, anyway — Dinah Washington was the first Queen of Soul and when is someone going to do a biopic of her?).
The next song was a rap number by Anderson Pack (whom I’d never heard of) featuring J. Rock (whom I had) called “Lockdown,” though it was actually surprisingly quiet, lyrical and subtle, not the angry rant I might have expected from the title. After that was one of the evening’s few non-political songs, from someone who calls himself Lonr. (the period, as well as the misspelling, seems to be part of the name) and who apparently has collaborated with the great modern-day R&B star H.E.R. — and his song, a plaintive love ballad called “Make the Most” about a young couple who are hoping their relationship will last, inevitably made me think, “He might as well call himself H.I.M.!” The next artist was Wayne Brady doing a tribute to the late Little Richard — a medley of “Lucille,” “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” “Long Tall Sally” and “Tutti Fruitti” — which wasn’t bad but suffered from the fact that, as capable as he is as a singer, Brady can’t play piano. After a rap by unidentified artists that introduced a tribute to Kobe Bryant, Alicia Keys came on for one of the best songs I’ve ever heard her do, a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tribute to the Black victims of police violence called “The Perfect Way to Die.” Then came the Atlanta-born R&B duo Chloe x Halle (they’re sisters, those are their real first names, and their last name is Bailey) doing an odd medley of two songs, “Forgive Me” and “Do It.” For “Forgive Me” they were dressed in skimpy black leather outfits that made them look like street hookers; for “Do It” (actually a gentler song than “Forgive Me,” despite what you’d think from the titles) they wore almost as skimpy bits of white cloth that made them look like call girls. But I really liked the scene towards the end in which, taking advantage of the fact that they weren’t performing live, they set up a split screen so the black leather-clad Chloe x Halle and the white-cloth clad Chloe x Halle appeared simultaneously: Chlor x Halle x Chloe x Halle!
Then came a performance by DJ Diesel backing a rapper who remained both unidentified and unseen on a quite good (for the genre) song called “Pop, Lock and Drop It.” The next number was by Summer Walker (a woman, whom I hadn’t heard of before) and Usher, a duet on a song that appeared to be called “You Don’t Know What Love Is” even though it had nothing to do with the oldie of that title; Usher seemed more comfortable here than he had covering James Brown at the Kennedy Center four years ago but lacked the wrenching power he’d brought to his own song, “I Cry,” on the Global Citizen telecast last Saturday. The next song was a medley of Jonathan McReynolds’ “Deliver Us from People” and Kane Brown’s (a woman) “You’re Missing Every Color” — or was it called “Undeniably Beautiful”? After that came the finale, a gospel number featuring Karen Chark Sheard of the legendary Clark Sisters and her daughter, Kierra Sheard, doing a powerful and towering song called “Something Had to Break” and showing where all African-American music ultimately comes from: the righteous power and soul of Black spirituals and gospel. There was also a segment featuring Michelle Obama giving a humanitarian award to Beyoncé — sometimes it feels like the Obamas are leading a government in exile while the fascist Trump occupation of America continues. Overall the BET Entertainment Awards show was the usual lumbering beast most awards shows turn into, and it suffered from the virtual presentation enforced on it by the pandemic (since both the presenters and the awardees had to film their segments in advance, the producers had to let them know who’d won in advance and there were no envelopes and no suspense), but they managed to work out a viable way to do an awards show in the SARS-CoV-2 era and some of the performances were wonderful.
