BET setting people up to fail.

This post is all about the BET awards last night. Oh boy. First, lets talk about the good things that happened last night.

Kevin Hart- Had a memorable performance as the host of the event. Kept it clean with no need for BET's censors during the live portions of his performance.

Nick Cannon- Openly admitted he couldn't rap as well as eminem as self deprecating humor. Hillarious.

Wiz Khalifa's speech after winning best new artist- I don't win these things often. It just came across as humble, and the awards shows don't have enough of that.

Now that the good is out of the way lets talk about the bad.

The general problem with BET is that there are 2 completely seperate audiences and it appears that the person who runs BET has an audience that they don't want. BET is a station for gospel R&B and other family friendly fare. It is also a station that has rap music, The game, and other decidedly unfamily friendly fare. BET over the last few years comes across as a station that doesn't really want to embrace the rap music with all of the qualities that come with it but has to because much of its audience is the rap generation.

This problem is generally fine in that its sunday audience is purely gospel and that other times like the Hip Hop Awards are solely dedicated to rap. It's where those two generations diverge that it becomes a problem. This is the BET awards where other than blackness there really is no common ground between Lil Wayne and Patti Labelle. Some jokes fall flat like the botched Anthony Weiner joke early in the performance and the Justin beiber joke where he said it was his first time at the BET awards both with not so subtle racial jokes, but that's normal. However there are further issues.

Problem: Every live performance with a rapper who curses- Every single rapper on stage cursed last night. Fine. But pick one or the other. The censoring was awful. It seems like BET allows its performers to rap the songs in their original versions but the censors try to bleep out all the bad words.

Solution: I've got a few.

Option 1) Tape delay. I understand the problem that BET has. Artistic integrity with songs that have bad words. For the sake of preventing the FCC fines, they have to censor these words. If you're going to allow songs like "Look at me now" to be performed, then do it on tape delay so that the censors don't have the impossible job of trying to decide which one of Busta Rhymes' words is bleepable. You can't do that live. Big Sean kept it clean in his perfomance and got censored because there were bad words in the original version in the song and they expected him to curse, which is usually hillarious.

Option 2) Tell the rappers to clean it up. Simple. Tell them they have to perform the clean version. That way the censors have less work to do.

Option 3) Have the show play later. Kids shouldn't be up at 11 PM anyway so if chris brown is talking "about his dick" it won't offend the audience.

Problem: Chris Brown, I mean Rihanna, I mean are you serious right now?

I laughed at Tiffany Amber Green or whatever her name is just like everyone else did. In reading the winner of the Viewers Choice award, she looks at the tablet and exclaims "Chris Brown!". Then she squints at the screen (apparently at a teleprompter) and says Rihanna. Then she looks on stage and Drake is coming up. I immediately thought she was at fault for obvious reasons. In my case, I thought she forgot her contacts/glasses, and in trying to be cute, couldn't see the writing at all. What later came out was stranger than fiction. Kevin Hart comes out on the stage at the end and clears up the confusion by saying Chris did indeed win the award. What happened was that the teleprompter gave the wrong name. Clearly, Drake got the wrong information as well, as the song had Rihanna featuring Drake. Also, a BET head admitted that he screwed up the situation and that it was his fault. Tiffany was set up to fail on that one. So was Chris Brown, imagine if he had also been walking up to the stage. Luckily there was no Good Morning America situation, and Breezy showed some maturity and didn't have an anger management moment. Of course, it may have helped that Chris Brown didn't do any further talking that night.

Solution: Tape delay. Would have solved everything, they could have done a lot of things to prevent that screw up. Live is overrated anyway.