Billboard Music Awards 2017: Nicki Minaj, Lil Wayne open show
Sunday night’s Billboard Music Awards broadcast started off of course with a performance from Nicki Minaj, which made a good bit of sense when you consider her impact on music and pop-culture over the past couple of years. She’s went from someone famous for featuring in some other songs to being a star in her own right.
The staging for this opening performance from Minaj was certainly elaborate, and the producers did a good job of cycling through some of her other hits before getting into what she was there to perform today with a regular who’s who of guest performers, including Lil Wayne and Jason Derulo. David Guetta at one point also came onstage to do a little bit of his DJ work.
One of the reasons why this opening performance worked was because it was meant to create an overall party atmosphere beyond just focusing on one single song. Everything bled from one performance to the next, and it was upbeat in a way that you want at the start of the show. This isn’t the place where you want to open things up with a ballad — that saps the energy out of the room, and you want to get the room going before slowing things down a little bit later. Ideally, you also want to end the show in a high-energy way given that these awards shows are ultimately the venue for this sort of high-production material. You can’t pull off many of these performers with all of the dancers and the elaborate staging anywhere else.
Overall, a very good start to the show. Even if you don’t consider yourself to be the biggest fan of Minaj in the world, you could still appreciate much of what she brought to the table here. This set probably paled in comparison to some of her previous hits, but it was absolutely the right way to start of the show rather than some sort of lengthy monologue with hosts Ludacris and Vanessa Hudgens. (That came a little bit later, as Vanessa went on about how Nicki was somehow her rap alter ego or something.)
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Meanwhile, head over to the link here in order to get some further news right now when it comes to the show. (Photo: Billboard.)