Saturday 2 September 2006

BMI's Urban Awards

The funny thing of the BMI's Urban Awards is that it was like a pop-up version of this column's observations for the last few years. Every "song" is "written" by a dozen or more people. Sometimes when the winners came to the stage it looked like a convention. When Mariah Carey - who was there and looking hot in a short, tight black cocktail dress - won for "We Belong Together", she was trailed by an entourage that resembled one of those cell phone network commercials.

Kenny "Babyface" Edmonds - the night's main honoree with longtime business partner LA "Antonio" Reid - got a kick out of it. A real composer - an overly effusive Reid kept calling him "the great songwriter since Lennon and McCartney" from the stage - Edmonds laughed as these huge scrums of "songwriters" grabbed their laminated cardboard plaques. Who were these people, I wondered? "They were in the room when the song was written," he laughed.

Del Bryant, the dapper and lovely bespectacled head of BMI, did his best to joke his way through the ceremony as he passed out the awards. His legendary parents, Boudleaux and Felice Bryant, have between them about 450 songs registered with BMI, including the Everly Brothers' hits "Wake Up Little Susie", "Bye Bye Love" and "Devoted to You". As Ashford and Simpson might say, ain't nothing like the real thing, baby. So what would Del Bryant's parents think of all this? "They wouldn't get it," he said.

One guy who did get it - a lot of it - was Sean Garrett. He was one of the few actual hip-hop writers in the room. The others were Pharrell Williams and Rodney Jerkins. I'm not even sure they won any awards, but Pharrell was wearing an all-fire engine red outfit - T-shirt, baseball cap - and sported about $8 million worth of bling around his slight neck.

Jerkins, on the other hand, was mostly jewelry free. A regular Michael Jackson contributor in recent years, Rodney told me that Jackson's called him about working on an album but it's not happening yet. "Anyway, he's got to listen to me if we do it. He's got to have a complete makeover first, change his whole image." And come back to New York. "I don't want to make an album in Bahrain," he laughed. Who could blame him?

And what of Mariah? They gave her special crystal awards - none of that cardboard stuff - for several of her hits from last year, plus a few she didn't pick up in years past. "I'm sorry I didn't come here in '92 and '98," she said, recalling her Big Diva years with Tommy Mottola. "I wasn't really hanging out then," she said wistfully, that whole period seeming like a distant - and maybe upsetting - dream.

(excerpt from Fox 411)



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