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The BET Awards Show recently aired on June 30, 2024. Even though I didn’t watch it, I heard about how rachet it was, and a bad look for black culture. One of my boys, hip me to the fact that the BET Awards Show, has gone downhill. Many new artists that performed on the show had no talent. BET aka (Black Entertainment Television) has been declining since Bob Johnson sold it to Viacom.
Bob Johnson put BET on the map. He placed BET into every black home in America. We had no representation, in the
mid-eighties when it came to black artists getting videos played on national TV. Bob created a platform where artists who weren’t as big as Michael Jackson and Prince could get airplay. MTV was a staple in American culture, but only rock bands were getting huge play on MTV, not black artists. Bob Johnson, birth BET out of a necessity and a need, that Black television programming was lacking in Black America, in the early eighties. The BET Awards Show was just a figment of our imagination until Bob Johnson created BET.
Hip Hop Found a Home at BET
Rap music was growing while BET was growing in the telecommunications industry. MTV didn’t want to play rap groups 
like N.W. A (Niggaz Wit Attitudes), Ice T, Run DMC, LL Cool J, Queen Latifah, and other black artists due to some of its violent nature, sexual content, or black culture in the music. Rap City with Big Tigger was born out of this. Hip-hop wasn’t mainstream like it is now, or widely accepted. As the years progressed, BET and hip-hop grew bigger, and stronger, and became a global phenomenon. Billions of dollars started pouring into record labels like Universal, BMG, Artista, EMI, Interscope, Def Jam, and many smaller labels at the time. Labels like Suave House, Rap A Lot, Ruthless, Deathrow, Badboy, No Limit, and Cash Money records opened a door for rap music. Major labels and indie labels figured they could work together and make billions of dollars in the process.
After Pac and Biggie Got Shot Music Got Degrading
In the 90s, the BET Award Show became a major event for R&B and hip-hop artists. The Source Awards, MTV Awards,
and the BET Awards Show were the biggest events in black music. Rival gangs like the Crips and the Bloods would have frequent run-ins at these awards show. Suge Knight gets on stage and calls out Bad Boys record executive Sean Puffy Combs in 1995 at the Source Awards. This led to a beef between the two labels Deathrow and Bad Boy. About a year later Biggie gets shot and the following year Tupac was killed due to the violence in hip hop. “No more Brenda’s Got A Baby,” “Juicy,” or “Keep Ya Head Up” songs to inspire the culture.
The destruction of black music started after Tupac and Biggie got shot. The war on hip hop began and hip hoppers were none the wiser.
The Hip Hop community has been closely and secretly monitored by the NYPD division’s Rap Intelligence Unit(RUI) since 1999. The policing of Hip-Hop artists and their fans began soon after the murders of Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I..G. – Is Hip Hop Dead.com
Rap Labels began investing in the prison industrial complex. Labels started pushing more violent ratchet music on black culture. The music went from a balanced meal to a culture of death and destruction in the black community.
The Destruction of The BET Awards Show
As the years progressed, white award shows like the Grammys and MTV, moved further away from hip-hop, due to its
negativity. They really only honored mainstreamed Billboard artists. So, that only left us with the Soul Train Awards and the BET Awards. Gangsta Rap and Consciousness rap that was so prevalent in the early to mid-nineties started to fade. Which really only left us with the hoe archetype and bootylicious style of music. Even though artists like Lil Kim and Foxy Brown, represented the hoe archetype, they still preached a message within their music, that ratchet artists today don’t. True R&B was slowly fading or becoming extinct, or more hip hop based, no more Whitney Houston, R Kelly, Escape, TLC, and other more ballad mainstream singers.
When you come full circle to what’s going on in today’s music artists like Sexyy Red, Megan The Stallion, Ice Spice, Lotto, Cardi B, Glo Rilla, Doja Cat, City Girls, and other female artists are just part of a much bigger plan. Selling their soul for crumbs to obtain richest, fame, and possessions of the world. The BET Awards Show, as you just witnessed, is now a minstrel show and all its participants are just minstrels dancing for the applauds of the ignorant. The BET Awards show is now just a cancer that is slowly eating itself.
Lord Have Mercy !!!
