Hey everybody!! I know I fell off my award show review grind but I wasn’t paying too much attention to the American Music Awards enough to write on it. But I am back to review the Soooooooooooul Train Awards 2012. The show this year was pretty good. The funny teddy bear Cedric the Entertainer was the host. Because the show was not presented live you didn’t get those crazy out-of-nowhere moments but still had some great moments. As I try to do with my award show reviews I will only hit what I thought were the highlights.
The Show Opener: I had the opportunity to be raised by older parents so I grew a love for Motown music as a young child. With that said, I truly enjoyed the opener. You had artists like Anthony Hamilton, Fantasia, and Marcus Canty giving tributes to artists of yesteryear. And before I go any further, let me just say that Fantasia not only looked great but sounded great too! She did a tribute to Aretha Franklin and it was stellar. The producers hit the nail on the spot with opening this show with this tribute. In a way, it was a tribute to Soul Train that helped get these acts out to the main stream.
The Awards: If you follow me on Twitter, you might have read my rant on pop acts being nominated in R&B categories (i.e. Rhianna). What I liked about this show is that you saw R&B acts (Miguel, Tyrese, and Trey Songz) in R&B categories. Award shows like the VMAs, Grammys, and even the BET awards put pop artists in R&B categories basically because they are black and popular and that’s not cool. Last night, you saw the real faces of R&B. The Soul Train Awards highlighted artists that do not get a lot of radio play but are doing different things in the music scene. It is refreshing to see an award show that is not all about the mainstream performers. It most definitely makes me want to look up the different artists and find some new music.
N-E for Lifers: Bobby, Ricky, Ralph, Mike, Ronnie, and Johnny did their thing last night. Soul Train presented New Edition with the well deserved Lifetime Achievement Award. Ronnie bought out a good point when he said that he is glad that they are getting their accolades while they are still here. I totally agree with this comment. Too many times we see artists being awarded long after they are dead. At first I was disappointed because I thought they were not going to perform but then they came back at the end to perform some of their biggest hits. Even though I was not born when they first came out, I found myself singing along with them. That just goes to show how their music has reached younger generations.
As far as I am concerned, this award show put some life back into the R&B genre. Other award shows give more light to Rock and Pop and R&B gets lost in the shuffle. It was good to see some old school artists as well seeing the new faces of the genre. I also enjoyed the seeing the flashback episodes of Soul Train (I’m still pressed that the show went off the air before I could become a Soul Train dancer). I also want to give shoutouts to BET for showing the award show on BET and not only on Centric (I don’t have the Centric channel and to be completely honest we just got BET a week ago). If you missed it last night, I am pretty sure that BET will be showing an encore presentation.
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