I'm not a fan of modern country (give me Hank Williams and Bob Wills, thanks) or of television, but last night I caught the opening of the Country Music Awards. Taylor Swift is certainly a pop star worthy of more respect than usual for maintaining her personal integrity in the limelight. All the more tragic, then, to see her deliver one of the weirdest three-minute TV segments I've ever witnessed.
Swift is very tall and even a touch awkward, yet she bounded around on the stage singing while stomping out a dance which must have been crafted by a bad choreographer with a name like Kinky Melons (one imagines a 50-year-old bleached blonde smoking Newports and croaking out, "Not that way, honey–like this"). She tossed her hair like a robot, slid down a pole, threw a chair off a platform and did some sort of weird thing where she flattened herself on the stage with her legs in a W shape. The only thing flatter than that move was the melody of "Forever and Always," which she gamely tried to deliver while hitting her marks with all the conviction of a dress rehearsal for a sixth grade pageant. I actually felt bad for Swift–who hired Melons, anyway? But Swift went on to win Entertainer of the Year, so I'm sure a bad performance won't exactly haunt her.
Here's the segment in question. Turns out it's actually improved by the lossy compression for the Web:
And in other awkwardly entertaining news, here's an intriguing double-header.
First, Jon Stewart calls out Sean Hannity for editing in footage from the 9/12 rallies while talking about the far smaller recent Tea Party action in Washington. (Note–the embed is frying the entire blog, so check it out here).
Then–is it just me, or is Hell getting chillier?–Hannity issues a mea culpa (though he claims it was an accident):
