The BET Awards

As I went through some tweets on Twitter two nights ago, one caught my eye right away. It said "Apparently Chris Brown is completely redeemed while Guru is completely forgotten," which was something that at first surprised me, but eventually became unsurprising because BET sold its soul to the current garbage known as commercial music years ago. The network stopped playing any intelligent rap in the late '90s when the Telecommunications Act of 1996 began having an effect on who got played--when gangsta rap gave way to materialism, there was no space on the channel for intelligent rap. What's even worse is that most of the people watching the awards show probably didn't even know who Gang Starr was, showing that an entire generation has no idea how good rap used to be.

Another tweet said that we should forgive Brown because God had already done so, which made me wonder if this other tweeter had the same mindset about Janet Jackson six years ago. It's pretty obvious that many people exhibited the same attitude towards Justin Timberlake for his role in the Super Bowl halftime show but not Jackson.

The Era of Superconferences

Nebraska is on its way to the Big Ten. This will supposedly pave the way for four superconferences--the ACC, Big Ten, SEC, and the Pac-12/14/16. Such shifts would kill the Big East and the Big XII conferences. Any teams left out of the seismic shift would be in big trouble, and it could lead to these superconferences breaking away from the NCAA. I have to wonder if such a move would result in an actual playoff for football because the traditional bowl tie-ins would become irrelevant. What about Division I-A football? The conferences left behind would be very few, and the NCAA would likely have to move some of the stronger I-AA conferences up to I-A. Basketball may also suffer from having these superconferences.