Kelli Kroepel | Opinion Co-Editor

This past Sunday, the American Music Awards took place, and I can’t say I was too impressed with the event. Katy Perry started the show by singing her recently released single “Unconditionally” while dressed as a geisha. Perry is being harshly criticized for sexualizing this important Japanese figure. I didn’t find the performance to be completely horrible, but I did think it was highly inappropriate. I just feel like she should’ve known that her performance was going to offend people.

I felt indifferent about a few of the other performances as well, especially the reunion of TLC. I’ve always been a fan of the group TLC, but I was just uninterested in their performance. The mix of their song “Waterfalls” and Lil’ Mama rapping was hard to follow. I appreciated their tribute to their fallen group member Lisa Lopes, but the performance seemed off in my opinion. It’s not much of surprise for me to say that Miley Cyrus once again left me speechless when she performed. As I am a fan of her song “Wrecking Ball”, I was too distracted by her bizarre cat uniform as well as the singing and crying cat on the background screen. I do appreciate that she wants to stand out from the rest of the artists, but sometimes I find her shenanigans to be diverting attention from her talent.

The performances were not all bad though. I was impressed with Jennifer Lopez’s routine that was created to honor Cuban singer Celia Cruz. The dancing was flawless, and she managed to change her outfit three different times. I was hoping that Rihanna would perform a song other than “Diamonds”, but the performance was still remarkable. Another performance that stuck out to me was Imagine Dragons performing their popular single “Demons”. I haven’t really paid much attention to the band since they’ve become popular, but find “Demons” to be a powerful song.

As far as the actual awards go, I was pleased to see that Rihanna won the first ever American Music Icon Award. The award was well deserved in my eyes. It was also nice to see that Justin Timberlake was recognized for a few awards, especially since his most recent album “The 20/20 Experience” was phenomenal. I wasn’t surprised at who won a majority of the awards, until it came down to the time to announce the winner of the Artist of the Year.

When they were listing the nominees for Artist of the Year, I actually thought to myself that Taylor Swift is the only person who I don’t think deserves this award, especially when the other nominees were artists such as Bruno Mars, Justin Timberlake, Rihanna, and Macklemore & Ryan Lewis. In my opinion, I felt that Macklemore & Ryan Lewis deserved the award. They’re newer artists, but their first major album was widely enjoyed. For them to go from almost nonexistent to taking over the charts with many of the songs that were on their 2012 album “The Heist”, it just seems that they should’ve been the obvious choice. I am a fan of Taylor Swift, but her 2012 album “Red” sounded just like her previous albums.

Overall, this year’s American Music Awards weren’t horrible, but there wasn’t anything that really stood out to me. Miley didn’t twerk even once in her performance, Kanye wasn’t there to interrupt Taylor Swift accepting her award, and there weren’t any extreme outfits, such as Lady Gaga’s meat outfit. I sat there through most of the show waiting for something exciting to happen. At the end of the event, I was left thinking ‘eh….’