BET’s Director Of Music Programming and Specials, Stephen Hill, has been dealing with a lot of rumors and reports lately.
DETAILS: Gunplay Speaks On BET Hip-Hop Awards Fight
First, Stephen refuted the reports stating BET’s long-standing music show 106 & Park was ending, and now he’s forced to explain the debacle that transpired over the weekend in Atlanta during the BET Hip-Hop Awards. Namely, the reported fight that took place between Rick Ross and Young Jeezy’s camps in the venue’s parking lot, as well as the melee between MMG rapper Gunplay and 50 Cent’s G-Unit.
Our friends at Complex caught up with Stephen to get his side of the story, as many varying reports have been flooding the ‘net.
DETAILS: Rick Ross & Young Jeezy Fight Backstage At BET Hip-Hop Awards
During his an exclusive interview with Complex, Stephen Hill revealed:
OK so let’s turn our attention to all the other things that have been written about your show. What can you tell us about what took place, and how the story has been told in the press?
I think there’s a lot of misinformation that went out. For the Twitter Generation, 140 characters for some people just equals truth—no matter who it’s from, no matter where those people are—whatever you read on Twitter is true. I think that’s one of the real problems of information accumulation in the last 5–6 years or so. There was absolutely an altercation behind the stage, it involved the crews of Ross and Jeezy. Ross and Jeezy passed each other in the hall. There was some shoving—it never turned into a fight. They realized it’s an awards show. They realized we spend a lot of money to make hip-hop look good on TV. We want to give them the same shining forum that other music forms get.
Maybe some members of the crew weren’t thinking that way. It was a dust-up, and it was over like that. I mean I’ve seen it on TMZ, there happened to be a mirror there, they weren’t throwing the mirror—it kind of just got in the way. If you look, people are trying to avoid the mirror as it falls. And Ross is walking towards the stage. This happened right before he went on stage.
Where were you when all this happened?
When Ross takes that left to get to the doorway, that’s roughly where I am. It was during a commercial break, so I wasn’t at the desk where I usually am, and when I came back, Ross was getting ready to go on stage. I had no idea what had just happened.
So he performed right after that took place?
Yeah, and if you see the performance, you could not tell. It didn’t spill out into the stage by any stretch of the imagination.
And you’re saying the artists were not involved in the shoving—it was only their crews.
We’ve debriefed as many people as humanly possible. It was not the artists.
OK now we’ve read a lot of other stuff. We read about gunshots in the parking lot
You heard about gunshots in the parking lot because somebody heard somebody say something, and they carelessly tweeted. Now they may have heard pyro, but no one has said there was gunshots in the parking lot. Police would’ve closed this down a completely different way had there been gunshots. If there’s gunshots, your show’s not going on. Everything comes to a halt. Nothing came to a halt.
Again, reckless tweeting. One person said there was gunshots. Somebody took that. I used to do this thing when I was a little kid. I used to say something outrageous. I’d say, “I read that somewhere.” I wrote it down, closed my eyes, and then I read it, and so it’s true. That’s exactly what happens with Twitter. People read it, so they think it’s true, and people retweet it like, “Oh my God, there were gunshots.” Cause some fool tweeted, “I heard gunshots.” There were no gunshots.
Well, there you have it. Stephen Hill admits that some of the stuff reported was true, but stories about a melee of gunshots is not, which MMG rapper Gunplay corroborates.
Find out what happened between 50 and Fat Joe and if BET really locked down their facilities at Complex.
SOURCE: Complex
