The 2011 BET Hip Hop Awards: The Best Award Show I’ve Never Seen

It’s just my luck that this would happen.


As you all know, I’ve spent all year watching and blogging about turrble, turrble award shows. Some were ghetto, some were boring, and others were just trainwrecks.


So I had no desire to watch last night’s BET Hip Hop Awards. And boy, was that a mistake.


My phone nearly vibrated itself to pieces as friends texted, tweeted and Facebooked me about the show. Not only did it feature the return of many old faces (The Overweight Lover Heavy D! LL Cool J! A somewhat sober DMX!) often-overlooked members of rap’s new generation, like Lupe Fiasco, finally got a chance to shine. International artists even got some face time. And there were tons of hard hitting freestyles as well. All we needed were the corpses of Biggie and Pac to hug it out on stage and moonwalk off into the night.


Of course, with my luck, if I had watched I would have been subjected to three hours of Lil B’s greatest hits, with Lil Boosie receiving a lifetime achievement award. Ugh.


But it’s cool – I’m sure BET will find time to replay the awards between daily airings of Notorious and Soul Plane. I’ll catch ’em at some point.


In the meantime, I stopped by BET.com to check out last night’s cyphers. For those of you whose knowledge of hip hop only pertains to guys bragging about the price of their jeeps, a cypher is an old school element of hip hop in which a collection of rappers freestyle one after another. And man, we were treated to some great ones. Veterans like Skillz, Lady of Rage and Busta Rhymes were merciless and even guys I’m usually indifferent to like Cousin Chris Brown and Meek Mill were impressive.


But by far, the best showing was the Eminem cypher, with Yelawolf and members of Slaughterhouse. Absolutely mind-blowing. Check it out below.