On Sunday, May 17th, the Billboard Music Awards were hosted to honor many notable mainstream artists in the music industry this year. The event was hosted in Las Vegas by Chrissy Teigen and Ludacris.
The night contained announcements of 41 honorable awards with nearly 82 nominees. Taylor Swift was nominated for fourteen awards (more than any other artist) and won eight, which was the most amount of awards received in one night at the BBMAs. Some awards included were the fan-voted Chart Achievement Award, which Swift obtained after being on the charts for her latest album, 1989, for 34 consecutive weeks. Other nominees included Iggy Azaela and Meghan Trainor. Trainor had the largest sales debut on the Billboard 200 for a female pop artist’s full-length album in nearly five years. Swift also debuted her long-awaited music video for her single, Bad Blood, at the event. This included a new verse by Kendrick Lamar and overall was creative, well-directed, and well-produced (and it was produced by Swift herself). Swift truly ran the show that night, most of the performers could not reach the expectations laid out for them after Swift’s debut of her music video.
The night also consisted of 17 performers, some of which you could argue were hardly a performance. Also, these 17 performers easily could have been cut down to only five or eight, to some 17 may have seemed a bit unnecessary. It also seemed to over shadow what the night was truly supposed to be about-the awards and nominees. Kanye West’s performance, for example, of All Day and Black Skinhead consisted of tacky fireworks and smoke machines, which disabled the viewers at home from seeing West, and could have easily been eliminated. The ABC award show also censored nearly a minute worth of West’s song. Some could argue that there really is no point to allowing a performance if that much is being taken out. The award show also only kept one camera on him during the entirety of the performance. It seemed as though they hadn’t even tried to get a clearer shot of his performance. Other performances, however, when really well and the artists did a fantastic job, including the collaboration of Fall Out Boy and Wiz Khalifa, who performed Fall Out Boy’s song Uma Thurman, as well as Ed Sheeran, who had a notable performance with his song Bloodstream.
Overall, the ABC award show has lots of room for improvement, specifically with its performers. The list of performers in general seemed a bit chaotic, with no disrespect to the artists, simply to the award show in general. It is understood that this was an award show to honor the music industry, but seventeen performers were simply too many.
