Bad blood over bad vids
Our resident Kiss92 DJ/journo thinks you should be required to make a great video to win a video award, whether you're black, white or whatever.
COMMENTARY
So I guess you've heard about last week's Nicki-Taylor Twitter War.
US rapper Nicki Minaj was upset that her music video for Anaconda didn't get a Video Of The Year nomination at the upcoming MTV Video Music Awards.
She implied that she would have got it if she were a skinny white girl.
Skinny white girl Taylor Swift, whose MV Bad Blood made the cut, took offence and politely told Minaj to step off.
The masses and the press ended up siding with Minaj, and the US pop star was forced to apologise, both publicly (on Twitter) and privately (over the phone).
Minaj accepted both, closing the chapter on a particularly ugly and shameful week in human history.
I'm not a huge fan of either, and neither video really seems award-worthy to me.
Bad Blood was created by B-movie director Joseph Kahn, who made the 2004 bomb Torque.
It's derivative of La Femme Nikita, The Fifth Element, Tron: Legacy and Sucker Punch, among others.
Swift basically poses around in a high-tech training facility for assassins, and about 1,000 of her famous "friends" - Selena Gomez, Cara Delevingne, Lena Dunham etcetera - make cameo appearances.
Bad Blood is crap.
As for Anaconda, the overriding theme is butts.
Minaj is basically in a jungle shaking her butt. It ends with her doing a lap dance for Canadian rapper Drake.
Anaconda is also crap.
All the racial stuff that Minaj brought up would make more sense if she had made a video that isn't crap.
You know which video isn't crap?
Kendrick Lamar's Alright, which DID get a nomination for Video Of The Year.
Alright is close to seven minutes long and is truly affecting, arresting, imaginative and sophisticated.
It exists on a whole other plane from the women's lame efforts.
Shot in black and white, it is a visual poem about the US hip-hop artist rising up out of the ghetto to offer hope to the people.
Alright is a very rare bird in that it has both a social conscience and a sense of humour.
It also has a sense of scale, with hundreds of extras and sweeping city vistas. It's also very personal, with Lamar giving us a glimpse into a very specific social milieu.
It's a true work of art, I think.
This is the miracle that can happen when you don't make a video about your butt.
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