S. Samuel
Odd Future leader Tyler, the Creator made sure not to sugarcoat his feelings toward the YouTube Music Awards last night (November 3) and unloaded what issues he has with the video-sharing platform.
Despite appearing at the awards, Tyler did not hold back on dishing out what irks him about YouTube’s inaugural awards show.
“YouTube, you guys had a beautiful platform to allow actual talent to people who take videos or whatever, on a creative level to actually give them exposure and award them for their creative work but you f*cking idiots decided to do the same sh*t with the same weak a** Katy Perry and Justin Bieber and all these weak a** things that everybody else knows instead of giving people who actually do things a f*cking chance to shine, so, YouTube, suck my d*ck and hopefully when you guys do movie awards, Ghost of the Hotel is nominated.” (Revolt TV)
Tyler and Odd Future sidekick Earl Sweatshirt performed at the star-studded event.
Earl Sweatshirt and Tyler the Creator then performed “Sasquatch” as they fought their way through a crowd of fans crammed into a bright pink box under the direction of Wolf Haley. The Award for Innovation of the Year was introduced as OK Go painted Schwartzmann up to blend in with a tiger painting. Destorm won for Innovation of the Year for “See Me Standing,” which he called “the dopest paperweight ever.” (PC Mag)
Last month, Tyler made his issues toward YouTube publicly known.
At least two prominent black artists — Flying Lotus and Tyler, the Creator — have spoken up publicly to say that the awards don’t do enough to showcase innovative artists who don’t have major labels backing their work. Tyler, who is ironically slated to perform at the awards ceremony at New York City’s Pier 36, took to Twitter to rail against the awards’ focus on what he called “teeny bopper sh*t.” Flying Lotus also took his complaints to Twitter. “If it’s all about hits sure I get it but let’s be fair. YouTube award nominations clearly don’t care about cutting edge/innovation. They had an opportunity to shine a light on all the artists that they helped to gain notoriety just to shit on them for uber famous acts. No disrespect to the nominees yadda yadda.” (COLORLINES)
Coincidentally, most of the big awards went to mega music stars like Eminem and Taylor Swift.
Somewhere in this miasma, there were awards (voted on by fans). Getting little red bricks with a “play” arrow on them were: Eminem for artist of the year; the K-pop phalanx Girls’ Generation for video of the year for “I Got a Boy”; Macklemore & Ryan Lewis for YouTube breakthrough; Taylor Swift’s “I Knew You Were Trouble” for YouTube phenomenon, whose award was accepted by Cimorelli, a group of sisters whose YouTube covers have been extremely popular. Their speech was interrupted by Win Butler of Arcade Fire, Kanye West-style, to insist that the real winner should have been Baauer’s “Harlem Shake,” which was true, so much as anything hewed to logic. (New York Times)
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Check out Tyler, the Creator’s interview:
