So, HiPipo held their second award ceremony last week!
It was a success, though left many disgruntled; how could
one Bebe Cool win six awards, is he part of the organizing committee or? How
did he even win the artiste of the year accolade over Radio and Weasel, Was
Rema’s Fire Tonight really a better
Ragga song than Cindy’s Selector and
how come that two years in a row, Bebe Cool, Rema and Navio are the top winners
in that exact order.
But the answer to
this lies in the awards’ tag line this year; Fans decide and much as I would have loved to add my voice to the other
music lovers’, it hit me hard that I had not taken even a minute to vote for
all the people I looted for to win, thus I didn’t have a case.
Awards are held every year both locally and internationally,
at the end of each, we always get the complaints, they don’t only come from the
fans but even the artistes; remember the 2008 saga, after being snubbed by the
PAM awards for a long time, Bebe said he would never attend, but when he won Artiste of the year in 2010, he embarked
on attending the shows that followed.
And it’s not just a local thing, Kanye West has absconded
from attending the Grammy Awards for six years now, he accuses them of always
overlooking his albums for the most converted award of the night, Album of the year and the story goes on
and on.
Most of the times, this is what you get when you give the
public the power of decision, even a fan that has no clue of what Reggae music
sounds like will vote considering there’s a name he knows.
We have a public that can’t tell the difference between a
good song and a bad song thus you can’t expect them to do a good job. When the
PAM awards were launched back in 2003, fans voted and gave Chameleon each and
every accolade he was nominated for, I remember him winning even a Gospel
accolade for his Bwosabba, but it
wasn’t the best gospel song, it was simply a mediocre song done by the most
famous artiste at the time but since the fans decided, he won.
This has been a problem in the much developed award shows
like MTV’s VMAs where in 2009 Taylor Swift won over Beyonce’s masterpiece which
saw Kanye protest. The Grammies have an
academy to nominate and choose winners but they too have messed up especially
this year when they declared Macklemore and Ryan Lewis as the top rap artistes
yet they are clearly pop. The Grammies are 56 and the VMAs 31 years old, HiPipo
is just two years, please, give them a break.
However, this doesn’t mean that Hipipo’s hands were clean
either, it was criminal for the show to call on Bebe Cool to announce Rema as
the winner – people have you ever seen Besigye announce Museveni’s results?
Then nominating Irene Ntale’s love letter as a Bebe Cool song in the Best Male Reggae song category, this
made Irene ineligible to win for a song she clearly owns because she’s female
and thus the later winning for what doesn’t belong to him.
The sex based categories like Best Female breakthrough artiste, Female Reggae song, Female
Hip Hop song, Male band song, Female Gospel song… think about it, how
many hip hop or reggae female artistes can we gracefully talk about? It’s like
some of these categories were engineered towards making it easy for some people
to win.
Why did some categories have less nominees than the others;
Best Male artiste had six, song writer four and Female Hip Hop three. In my
opinion, if a category can’t raise even five possible nominees merge it with
another one; if there less than five female reggae artistes, merge the sexes or
genres, Ragga can clearly merge with Reggae to create a single but very
competitive category. This has been done and tested else where, for a long time
the Grammy Awards had Hip Hop and RnB combined and the VMAs still do it that
way but when it comes to music from Jamaica, all Music shows from the Grammies
to BET’s Soul Train awards, Ragga and Reggae are combined – it’s the reason the
likes of Shaggy have Reggae Grammy awards.
Then the confusing categories like Best Artiste on Social
media, what on earth does this mean, one with the biggest number of likes and followers
or one that loses his life to tweeting? How does the public vote for the Best live on stage performer? Some of
these people have never even attended concerts.
And what on earth is Best
performance in a video, is it about the best dance in a video, acting,
singing…what’s the meaning of the category?
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