So you’re on tour and your manager calls you up and tells you you’ve won an awards. Cool. What award is it? An MTV Music Video Award. Alright, sweet. Then your manager tells you to check your messages. He’s sms’ed you a photo of the award. Your bands name is wrong.
This is the scenario that The Black Keys lived through when they won the 2010 MTV Video Music Award for ‘Tighten Up’ that MTV had mistakenly engraved with ‘Black Eyed Peas’ on the trophy. Now singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach has opened up about the incident in an interview with GQ.
When asked if they discovered the mistake on stage Auerbach said “No, we weren’t there. We didn’t go. We were on tour and our manager sent us a picture of the award [laughs] and the plaque read, you know, “The Black Eyed Peas—’Tighten Up.’ Breakthrough Video.” I was just like, Wow. A channel that’s never respected us or played us to fuck us like that? [laughs] It’s kind of awesome.”
But the band weren’t angry, “Literally, it was perfect!” he said. “It could not have been better than that. I mean, MTV is kind of a joke now anyway—what’s more funny than that?”
And in case you were wondering what happened to the award Auerbach explained “Well, we went back and forth: “God, what do we have to do?” And then we figured that we should get proper ones made with our names on it, because in 20 years, nobody’s going to know who the Black Eyed Peas are. We’d have this stupid award with Black Eyed Peas on it and nobody’s going to get the joke. So we decided to get our own award. But they made us send them back before they would give us proper ones.” Real classy MTV.
The band recently relocated from middle America somewhere in Ohio to the warmer climate of country capital Nashville, Tennessee, and they’ve started a work on a new album. “The new album doesn’t sound like Brothers.” said singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach back in July. “It doesn’t have that open soul feel to it. It’s way more driving and the tempos are really fast.”
