Photo Courtesy of FDRMX
This morning Jason Derulo was featured on Good Morning America, and fans of the hip-hop/R&B singer could not have been more excited. Teenage girls shrieked every time host Tom Kelly mentioned Jason’s name (or the tech-guy Ed’s, for that matter). However, since the show airs live on TV there was an unexpected and enormous amount of starting and stopping from the show’s “beginning” at 7:00am (sound check) until the prompt closing at 9:00am. The festivities didn’t go live until 8:30am, and the first hour and a half was full of run-throughs, sound checks, and audience participation “rehearsals”.
I honestly expected this show to be more like a typical concert (albeit a bizarrely early one). I thought Derulo would go on around 7:00am, maybe 7:30am, and do a two-hour show with a couple breaks. I presumed that Good Morning America would do their usual morning news show, and cut to Derulo’s ongoing live performance at the appropriate times. If they happened to shoot him doing a slightly less amazing dance move, or a lower-energy song, oh well, it’s still live, but at least it would have been a real representation of his performance.
I was wrong. Instead, Derulo had to cater to the artifice of the TV crew. It seemed, the concert wasn’t about the music at all; it was about getting the best camera shot! The audience was so, sooo ready to cheer, to dance, to wave their arms and bounce those beach balls, but they kept getting told to save it for when Derulo came back out. The energy remained imbalanced throughout. At each lull, the audience would calm down, get out their phones and take pictures of whatever Tom Kelly told them to until it was time to “get ready for some serious fun!”, and to “cheer for Jason Derulo like you haven’t seen him yet!”, or to mug for the camera again (with no Derulo in sight). It took incredible amounts of energy from the MC to re-hype the crowd over and over again just to make it look like a “live” show on TV. All they really had to do was just let Derulo take the stage, wind him up and let him go, and all the excitement and energy would have been there.
Despite the intrusive and nonsensical “TV-ness” of the whole thing, Derulo killed it. Appearing in full Patriotic couture (wearing an antiqued American flag t-shirt and jacket), he performed four hit songs including “Wiggle”, “Whatcha Say”, “Talk Dirty”, and “In My Head.” The audience sang along for every one of them. A gaggle of teenage girls standing next to me (the notorious shriekers) at one point yelled in unison, “I love you, Jason!” during a run-through. Derulo slowly smiled and replied, “I love you more.” Oh, if he could have seen their faces. They didn’t catch that on TV.