2020 American Music Awards (Dick Clark Productions, ABC-TV, aired November 22, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last Sunday, November 22 (the 57th anniversary of the assassination of America’s first Roman Catholic President, John F. Kennedy, and the first such anniversary since the election of the second one, Joe Biden) ABC-TV aired the American Music Awards. This was one of those rump “music awards” shows concocted by the late Dick Clark and still put on by his production company (the man is dead, but his corporation lives on!) and which was harder for me to listen to or watch. That was partly due to the atmosphere created by the production in general and the host, Taraji P. Henson, in particular -- she looks like the sort of desperate party hosts who keeps asking her guests to tell her how much fun they’re having because she doesn’t think they’ll have fun unless she repeatedly tells them to -- and partly due to the relentless aural assault of two of my least favorite musical genres, electronic dance music (EDM) and rap (or “hip-hop,” to use the euphemism for rap used by people who actually like it). I give the people currently running Dick Clark Productions credit for stocking their show overwhelmingly with people of color -- the talent roster was largely African-American and most of the performers who weren’t Black were Latino or Latina (I am not under any circumstances going to use that hideous example of politically correct language run amok, “Latinx”!). Dick Clark Productions celebrated the increasing popularity of Latin music by adding more categories for it, though all too much of what passes for “Latin music” today is just over-loud dance or rap with overlays of Latin percussion.

Ironically, the show opened with two white people, Justin Bieber and Shawn Mendes (though with that last name, maybe he counts as Latino even though he doesn’t look it) doing a jumble of songs whose titles I guessed as “I’m So Lonely,” “Oh God (The Way You Hold Me Makes Me Holy),” “The Way You Make Me Feel,” “I Had a Chip on My Shoulder,” and “What If I Fell?” Bieber’s contributions to this weird medley actually sounded good -- like he’s writing self-revelatory songs trying to come to grips with his “bad boy” past and assure us he’ll be better now -- but Mendes’ seemed like the usual “sensitive” singer-songwriter romantic sludge. Next up was a dance number led by Henson and a chorus line that touched on greatness only when it sampled Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” -- not one of his better songs but a good groove and an accomplishment far above most of the artists represented here. After Henson’s dance number the white Katy Perry and the Black Darius Rucker came together for Perry’s hit “Only Love” -- which I hadn’t realized before was premised on the idea of what you would do if you had only one day left to live -- but it’s a beautiful song and was by far the best item on the program. Afterwards The Weeknd (which is actually an individual, not a group, and he was wearing a bandage on his head that made him look like a cross between the Invisible Man and the Joker -- he wore it on his video segment and later when he made two “live” appearances at the main venue, the Microsoft Theatre in L.A., and I wondered if he’d really had a head injury or it was just part of his costume) joined forces with the unspeakably awful saxophonist Kenny G for a song that appeared to be called “Save Your Tears for Another Day,” an unmemorable tune which The Weeknd illustrated with a video of himself walking down a deserted road while pyrotechnics went off on either side of him.

Then came one of the better parts of the program -- Megan Thee Stallion (whom I admire partly because she’s a “woman of size” -- albeit in great shape and physically able to do spectacular dancing -- and partly because of you’re going to misspell “the,” “thee” seems a much more appealing way to do it than “tha”) doing a rap-dance number called “Body” which celebrated her own and her choristers’ bodies, which were clad in highly revealing black outfits that showed more skin than you’d think possible on a network TV show. I liked it but I’m not sure it would be as effective just as a record without the video portion. After that came a new artist, Lewis Capaldi, singing a song called “(So) Before You Go” which seemed to be hitting all the “sensitive” stops in the manual How to Be a Singer-Songwriter. Then Billie Eilish came out and did a new song called “I Think, Therefore I Am” (well, if Kelly Clarkson could rip off Nietzsche for her song “Stronger,” why couldn’t Eilish do it to Descartes?), which I liked but it didn’t seem as strong as the material on her multi-Grammy Award-winning CD. But at least I give Eilish credit for getting rid of the green shit she’d been wearing in her hair lately that had made it look like birds had crapped big-time on her head. The next number was another typical rap atrocity by Nelly and City Spud whose titles (like a lot of artists on this program, they mashed up several of their songs instead of doing just one) seemed to be “I’m Going Down, Down,” “Who Knows?,” and “Take a Ride with Me.” (No, thank you.) Then Jennifer Lopez (whom I usually can’t stand) and Maluma (whom I’ve liked in other contexts) joined forces for a medley of “Papi” and “Marry Me.” After that Dua Lipa -- yet another performer who’s a single person using a name that sounds like a group -- did an O.K. song called “Levitating.”

Then someone introduced Bell Biv DeVoe as “the first boy band” (really? What about the Four Seasons, the Beach Boys or a bunch of kids from Liverpool, England you may have heard of called The Beatles?) with something called “Do Me, Baby” whose sentiments were as crude as that title (assuming I’ve guessed it right). Afterwards came the show’s concession to country music, Dan + Shea doing a song as interminable as its title: “I Should Probably Go to Bed.” That would probably have been a good idea for me, too, but instead I stuck it out and lasted through some numbers that were at least marginally better than what had come before: 24K Gold’s and Ian Dior’s “Mood,” Shawn Mendes’ “I Wonder What It’s Like to Be Loved by You,” rapper Lil Baby doing “Emotionally Scarred” (a bit more tolerable than most hip-hop because at least the performer exhibited some humility in the face of a traumatic life instead of crudely bragging in the relentless way that is one of the things I most intensely dislike about rap). Bebe Rexha’s and Doja Cat’s “Maybe I’m Jealous” (two talented singers that could move me more with stronger material), someone named Machine Gun Kelly (who turned out to be a white pop-punk artist even though I suspect he was leafing through an old late-1970’s music magazine, saw a photo of the Sex Pistols or the Damned, and thought that was a cool look he should emulate) doing songs called “Bloody Valentine” and “My Ex’s Best Friend” that were the closest things to rock ‘n’ roll on the show (even though the only live parts of the performance were Kelly’s singing and Travis Binder’s drumming -- you could hear a guitar but Kelly, though he was wearing one, wasn’t actually playing it); and the finale, the South Korean boy band BTS doing a couple of songs, one in Korean and one in English in which they mumbled so badly they sounded almost as incomprehensible as they had singing in Korean. At least they’re probably breathing a lot easier over the outcome of the last U.S. Presidential election -- now they have a President who actually gives a damn about South Korea’s national survival instead of one who literally wrote love letters to the crazy North Korean dictator who’s trying to take them over!