2013 BET Awards: Robin Thicke performs ‘Blurred Lines,’ Mariah Carey ‘#Beautiful’

To go along with the full list of winners that we shared earlier for the 2013 BET Awards, we have a set of performances that capture a little bit of 1990s pop history along with something new.

Let’s start with the latter, mostly because Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” is currently the song that is on every radio station known to man, and is being pegged with that official “Song of the Summer” label. This is great news of course for Thicke, Pharrell Williams, and T.I., as none of the three have seen a hit of theirs take off like this in some time. The song has a super-great hook, the lyrics that are easy to remember, and the three can put on a pretty good performance while all singing live. Isn’t that always what artists are really supposed to do in the first place? We like to think that the answer to this question is in fact “yes.”

In addition to Thicke’s performance, we also had Mariah Carey and Miguel join forces for “#Beautiful,” which feels in some ways like one of her older hits with that Twitter hashtag put in front of it. This song was not a gigantic smash like “Blurred Lines” when it came out earlier this year, but it did at least receive some strong sales and a promotional spot on most of “American Idol” this season. (As an aside, did anyone else find it unbearably funny that Carey and Nicki Minaj still have to see each other all the time at these awards shows, even thought the two more or less hate each other?

What was your favorite performance of the night? For more coverage of the BET Awards winners (as suggested earlier), check out the article here.

Photo: BET