Features
West Hits The Roof
The fact his “Touch The Sky” video didn’t win an MTV Europe award caused
“If I don’t win, the awards show loses credibility,” he yelled. All the winners are chosen through fan voting.
Although it cost 1 million dollars, had footage of the star jumping across canyons and also had Pamela Anderson in it, West’s video wasn’t even nominated and the award went to Justice Vs Simian for “We Are Your Friends.”
It’s not the first time the rap star, who took the gong for best hip-hop act, has suffered a meltdown at an awards show. In 2004, he complained bitterly because he left the American Music Awards empty-handed.
It was the first time the awards, which are staged in a different European city each year, have been split between two venues, although using Copenhagen’s main Raadhuspladsen square in November was always a risky venture.
“Temperatures will be just above freezing so, yes, it’s going to be cold,” Bill Vejdegren of the Danish Meteorological Institute said on the eve of the show.
One problem the 13th staging of the awards did escape was the taxi strike that was threatened because the Copenhagen cabbies didn’t get the job of ferrying the various celebrities around.
“We will completely block the Bella Center venue,” Joergen Egemark from Denmark’s national taxi association told the Internet version of the Danish daily Politiken.
He threatened that the 2,300 taxis in the Copenhagen region were sufficient to block everything. But Flemming Schmidt from Live Nation’s DKB Concertpromotion, which organised the production for MTV, said that’s not enough taxis for the stars and that the public and the city wouldn’t have any vacant vehicles left on the streets.
Ib Terp, the president of the body responsible for issuing taxi licenses in the Copenhagen region, defended MTV’s decision on the grounds that the taxi drivers’ association wasn’t able to provide the necessary service.
“The organizers have asked for vehicles that do not display advertisements [which taxis do] and drivers with good linguistic skills,” Terp told Politiken.
With the promise of so much business, the taxi drivers relented and could have made good money on such a cold evening.
Among the award winners at the 3,000-capacity Bella Centre were
The best R&B award went to 18-year-old
The acts playing the 10,000-capacity Raadhuspladsen included
The show was broadcast live to 17 countries with a potential 1.4 billion viewers.
– John Gammon