Music

Over 20,000 people petitioned to take away Iggy Azalea's Billboard Music Award

by Jeremy Mersereau

It’s there’s one thing that’s definitely not a waste of time, it’s starting petitions to take away meaningless awards from pop culture figures! A now-closed Change.org petition garnered over 20,000 signatures in an attempt to strip Iggy Azalea (guy reading this: “OH HELL YEAH!” *starts signing*)… of her Billboard Award for Top Rap Song for “Fancy” (guy: “…oh”). While Iggy’s quite literally a pale imitation of a good rapper and I’m totally down for taking away all awards from her forever, the reasoning behind the petition is a little more compelling:

Iggy Azalea’s 2015 Billboard Award for Best Song has been proven invalid. The eligibility time period for nominations is March 10th, 2014 through March 2015. “Fancy” was released on February 17th, 2014, nearly a month before the eligibility starting. This is unfair to the other nominees in these category, especially to “Anaconda” by Nicki Minaj, who most likely would’ve won. Billboard did not follow their own guidelines and should have to recalculate these nominations without “Fancy” as a nominee.

While this argument might seem to check out, it’s actually a non-issue, as Billboard simply uses ‘reporting period’ (in this case, from March 2014 to 2015) and doesn’t take into account a song’s release date when evaluating popularity. A dejected message posted today from the petition’s founder, Christian Ferguson, mentions that a spokesman for Dick Clark Productions contacted him and let him know that Iggy would be keeping her award. But what’s this? The update also reads:

Let’s make sure Nicki rightfully takes what’s hers home next year by requesting radio stations to play “Hey Mama” and “The Night Is Still Young”, as well as purchasing them both on iTunes if you haven’t already!

Wait just a minute, Christian! Something tells me you were never concerned with ‘eligibility’ and ‘fairness’, you just like Nicki more than Iggy and wished she had won! How dare you try to cloak your shadowy true intentions in the noble guise of the Billboard Music Awards eligibility guidelines? For shame, Christian, for shame.