With the 2024 CMT Music Awards on tonight, we thought… I not spin it back to some of the most memorable moments in CMT Music Awards history?
Well, turns out there aren’t any…
The CMT Music Awards are always the biggest snoozefest of any country music awards show. Utterly pointless. And let’s be honest, CMT doesn’t even play music videos anymore. It’s just 24 straight hours of re-run television sitcoms like Mike & Molly, Last Man Standing, and King of Queens.
So why they still have their own awards show is anybody’s guess…
That being said, the only moment that comes to mind was actually quite hilarious, and it is from relative recent history. The only reason I remember it is because I had to catch a flight to Nashville the next morning for some kind of “business” trip, although I can’t for the life of me remember what that meaningless “business” was being conducted.
Anyways, we’re taking it back to the 2019 CMT Music Awards, right before Zac Brown crawled into his weird mid-life crisis and started rapping about Gucci bags and Patrick Swayze (how you gonna disrespect Patrick Swayze like that?)
What a wild time that was…
In 2019, Zac Brown and company accepted the Group Video of the Year award for their song “Someone I Used to Know.” During his acceptance speech, which read more like an on-stage rant, Zac spent some time thanking the fans before things went off the rails.
“We’re so grateful and we get our award every night when we get to show up and do what we love. This award is for all of you, my band and all the outsiders that waited through everyone’s doubts.
For you young artists, have courage to stand up against the machine, be yourself, work hard, and one day you can stand up here and tell all the haters to f*** off.”
At the time, it was completely out of left field…
Yikes…
The way everyone just kinda stands there…. HILARIOUS.
At the time, I tweeted this out… and boy was that a sign of awful things to come.
Later that year, Zac Brown Band would go on to release The Owl, which is by far the worst thing they ever put out, and the Zac doubled down with an even worse solo project called, The Controversy.
If you need a refresher on Zac’s God-awful rap effort, here’s one called “God Given.”
Impossible to Understand
And then in an interview with The Tennessean, Zac said that it was “an impossibility” for people to “really listen and artistically understand my music.”
He implied that they were too stupid and uncultured to understand it:
“It’s a matter of what other people have been exposed to. If all they’ve known is to hate things that are foreign to them and to not listen for something that moves them and to be open, they’re (not going to understand).
I think my traveling has given me the ability to be open and take in so many different things. All of those tastes combine into making me who I am. I’ll dive deep into someone’s music and … I’ll start to realize what’s really good about something.”
Let’s check out the chorus from a little song called, “Swayze.”
“I can’t be your Tom Cruise bitch, I’m Patrick Swayze. Every time I get a new b****, I need a new b****. I’m just sayin’, I’m so Swayze. ‘Bout to ghost on you, b****.”
Deep stuff… definitely too hard for dumbass like me to understand.
Anyways, Zac Brown Band’s most recent album, The Comeback, was exactly that… a comeback to Earth. Featuring some Luke Combs co-writes, a Marcus King collab, and more, it was MUCH better than the previous stuff.
But looking back, it seems like this 2019 CMT Music Awards acceptance speech definitely was a sign of strange things to come.
Airing live from Austin, Texas, tonight, this year’s ceremony will be hosted by Kelsea Ballerini:
