What’s Wrong with the MTV Music Awards?

Music Awards are all a bit weird really. They are more of a popularity contest than an actual award for musical prowess. You can pretty much tell who is going to win from the moment the nominations are announced and the award show itself is more just a big PR event than a tense, nail biting results show.
The MTV Europe Music Awards this year took place in Belfast, Northern Ireland and sent a lot of big names home with big awards and big smiles:
Predictably, this year the big winner was Lady Gaga. She won:

• Best Female
• Best Video
• Best Song
• Biggest Fans

‘He who shall not be named’ won ‘best pop’ and ‘best male’, while Bruno Mars won ‘best new act’ and ‘best push act’.

But it’s not these pop awards that are the main problem with the MTV Music Awards, no it’s the rock category of the awards.
The best kind of rock music is that played by a rock band – which Linkin Park certainly are not. There were some great rock bands on there in the shape of the Foo Fighters and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and they have won many awards at this sort of pop extravaganza, but the pop world only seem to know of about 3 or 4 actual rock bands in the last few years.

Where are the awards for new rock music, not just for acts that have been putting out records for decades? Rock music is all about being fresh, ground breaking, current and extreme, all of which the bands that win the rock award are not, or were a long time ago. It’s like the MTV Awards are behind the times and are afraid to reward a band for being inventive and instead only reward based on record sales.
Now I am not naïve enough to think that this is not exactly what they are doing, but shouldn’t there be a category that isn’t based on paper success? Arguably these are the biggest music awards around, so they should take more responsibility for encouraging and rewarding new rock bands.

One thing MTV got spot on this year however, was awarding Queen with a Global Icon award. They really are rock legends of the highest calibre that were able to span the genres in a way that many struggle to do. You can find people of all kinds of music tastes that love Bohemian Rhapsody and Under Pressure as much as any tune from their specific genre of choice.
What did you think of the MTV Music Awards?

Author Bio: Jim Anderson is a former rock musician. He has since had many music teacher jobs and spends his weekends fixing up second hand guitars