

If there isn’t time for Paula Abdul to perform at any given awards show moving forward, she should at least be allowed a hat at someone’s neck. It’d take two seconds and it would make awards season so much more exciting and dangerous.
Never thought I’d be typing this, not even as someone who drove to Jersey to see Paula Abdul in concert in the last year, but Paula Abdul utterly smashed this year’s Billboard Music Awards. Unreal. Hers was the most entertaining performance of a night that featured a bunch of contemporary hit-makers who seemed bored by their own material, in addition a detrimentally pitchy greatest hits performance by Mariah Carey, as well as Madonna traipsing around a bunch of CGI versions of herself that were a total rip-off if in fact they cost the Daily Mail’s highly dubious quote of $5 million. Paula Abdul, who at 56 hasn’t charted in the Top 40 of Billboard’s Hot 100 chart in about 24 years, was the essential performance of the 2019 Billboard Music Awards, and her mic seemingly didn’t transmit a thing coming out of her mouth (if anything was in fact coming out of her mouth at all). What a time to be alive and amongst living legends!
Abdul’s nearly six-minute performance, also a hit medley, was choreographed within an inch of her life (hell, all of our lives) and still managed to seem unhinged. Part of that was a result of unexpected turns—a few missed steps during the opening tap dance that revealed she was tap-syncing, the aforementioned near-decapitation of Julianne Hough by fedora. But there were baked-in moments so wild they seemed feral.



Only Paula Abdul could make flopping into an art form.