Media Meditation #4 Perez Hilton, My Mom & The Dude at the Bar on Adam Lambert

"You know honestly, if I offended some people… it's apples and oranges. I'm not an artist that does things for every single person. I believe in artistic freedom and expression, I believe in honoring the lyrics of a song, and those lyrics aren't really for everybody either." - Adam Lambert (Taken from PerezHilton.com, interview with Ryan Seacrest)

Unfortunately (or not) I didn’t catch the American Music Awards on Sunday night but I sure caught all the highlights. Whether it was from skimming through Tweets, reading Facebook status updates or looking at YouTube.com videos, I couldn’t miss hearing about all the drama of the night from Jennifer Lopez’s fall and Lady Gaga’s outfit (check out my friend Corey's blog here to hear more about what Lady Gaga has been up too) to Adam Lambert’s risqué performance. “Everyone” posting about it online is an example of a personal shift in the way information is passed around. Just like in Feed, even though I wasn’t searching for this information per say, it was sure being given to me. Even outside of the Perez Hilton social media world, my mom asked me if I saw Adam’s  debut performance of his new single and so did my male friend at the bar on Monday night. (Bar on a Monday night? It’s Thanksgiving break… come on!) It’s amazing to me how everyone in America seems to know about this gay man’s provocative performance during a music awards show on TV yet we don’t know how many of our own citizen’s are being killed in Iraq or Afghanistan right now. This is an example of one of our seven basic principles, “reality” construction; the media shows us clips, photos and words on Adam’s performance to put us into this world where that is the most important news fact.

Many people enjoyed Adam’s performance on Sunday night but at the same time, many disagreed with it. A good example of individual meaning here, some people look at his performance as him being a positive gay role model, others think it was . Lambert performed his newest single, For Your Entertainment. During the gig, he simulated oral sex with a male dancer as well as made out with one of the male band members. He also grabbed his crotch multiple times. Lambert responded to the backlash of this performance by saying, "There's a big double standard, female pop artists have been doing things provocative like that for years, and the fact that I'm a male, and I'll be edited and discriminated against could be a problem. People are scared and it's really sad, I just wish people could open their minds up and enjoy things, it's all for a laugh, it's really not that big of a deal." (Taken from PerezHilton.com) This is interesting to think about the double standard because remember when Britney Spears and Madonna made out on national television? Yup, everyone loved it and posts online were nothing but praise.

When I Googled Adam Lambert’s name to try and out more information on the performance and what happened, I was bombarded with articles about it. Perez had an opinion (of course) and so did many “news sources” such as MTV, USA Today and ABC News. The AMA are produced by ABC, also important to note is the fact that ABC apparently got 1,500 complaints about the performance after it aired on the east coast. Turns out, they didn’t air the performance when the show played for the west coast audience and it’s interesting to note that I could only find the video of the performance on Perez’s website! I searched Google videos and Youtube.com and couldn’t find one of his actual performance at all, only something that was previous rehearsal for the live performance which I have embedded below for your viewing pleasure.

Surprise, surprise, the performance of Adam on ABC’s morning show, Good Morning America scheduled for the morning after the AMA’s was suddenly cancelled. The network didn’t officially announce any reason for the cancellation but it’s pretty obvious that the network for nervous for what Lambert would do on live, morning television. CBS however picked up the performer to appear on their morning show, The Early Show the following morning to be aired on Wednesday, good move on their part I think. 

Most important to note throughout all this is although Adam made a lot of people upset with his performance, he made thousands talk about him.