What to watch at the Mnet Asian Music Awards (MAMA 2021), the most anticipated event of the year?
In addition to announcing more than 17 most important award categories in 2021, the MAMA 2021 Awards Ceremony also promises to bring many unprecedented performances.
The Mnet Asian Music Awards – MAMA 2021 will officially take place from 4pm this afternoon at CJ ENM Contents Studio, Paju city. This will be the place to welcome hundreds of Korea’s top famous artists and millions of fans to Korea’s most important music event.
MAMA 2021 will start at 4 pm (KST) December 11 with a red carpet event. The official show will open from 6 pm hosted by “Kpop icon” Lee Hyori. The entire program will be officially broadcast in 13 countries and territories.
The announcement of the winners of four prestigious Daesang awards, including Artist of the Year, Album of the Year, Song of the Year, and Worldwide Icon of the Year, is the centerpiece of the Awards Ceremony. The most interesting category is Worldwide Icon of the Year, as it is the only Daesang award that still includes a voting form from the global public. The Icon race of the year began on November 4 and ended on December 9.
The results of the Top 10 artists receiving the most votes on the website 2021mama.com have not changed much compared to the preliminary round. But most of these changes are shocking to many Knetizens. Leading the top position is still BTS, Stray Kids and ENHYPEN with scores of 16.99%, 15.84% and 7.54% respectively. In the past 15 days, BTS’ fans have had to worry many times because Stray Kids’ fans have almost caught up with and surpassed them.
The same situation happened with ENHYPEN and NCT DREAM when the two were only 0.18% apart. Meanwhile, TWICE suddenly surpassed both BLACKPINK Lisa and Rosé. In just a few minutes before the voting closed, TWICE jumped from 10th place to 8th place, surpassing Lisa and SEVENTEEN.
With this result, BTS will almost certainly be named to receive the Worldwide Icon of the Year award, marking the 7 boys’ unbeaten record in this category since the award was first announced in 2018. However, it is also important to note that the voting ranking at 2021mama.com only holds 80% of the results, the remaining 20% will belong to Apple Music streams and Twitter votes. In which, the final criterion (Twitter) will be counted until the last minute, before the award is officially announced. This means that Stray Kids still has a chance to take the throne.
Besides the award ceremony, MAMA attracts the attention of most of the global K-pop fans because it will be the biggest event of the year. Revealing about the grandeur of this year’s show, Mr. Park Chan Wook – Production Director at Mnet – said, “We will use modern technology, such as augmented reality (AR), to show eye-catching performances”. This decision is not out of the original prediction when BTC chose the topic Make Some Noise to promote the influence and cultural power of K-pop globally.
Before the event, Mnet had the first revelations about the main performances of this year’s event. Initial information said that the opening performance of the MAMA Awards Ceremony will be the ultimate collab by members of 6 4th generation groups. Accordingly, Hyunjin from Stray Kids, Wooyoung from ATEEZ, Yeji from ITZY, Yeonjun from TOMORROW X TOGETHER, Karina from aespa and Heeseung from ENHYPEN will perform together on the same stage for the first time.
This year’s MAMA also received great expectations because of the appearance of Ed Sheeran in the line-up. The US-UK star, the owner of 2 Grammy Awards, prepared a mashup performance of his two famous songs, Bad Habits and Shiver. Previously, Ed Sheeran participated in writing lyrics and composing BTS‘s songs “Make It Right” and “Permission to Dance”. Shiver is also the song that he collaborated with two Korean artists, Jessi and SUNMI.
Not only that, this year’s awards ceremony will also mark the return of K-pop queen Lee Hyori and boy band Wanna One. The two were once icons of 2nd and 3rd generation Korean music. After many years of diverging activities, they will return once again on the MAMA stage. Lee Hyori has confirmed that she will perform her hit “Hey Mama”, collaborating with members of eight teams from the popular dance show Street Woman Fighter.
MAMA 2021 has officially announced the participating artist lineup including aespa, NCT 127, NCT Dream, NCT U, TXT, ATEEZ, Brave Girls, ITZY, Stray Kids, ENHYPEN, Jannabi, 8 Street Woman Fighter dance groups, super international star Ed Sheeran and 2 Japanese boy bands JO1 and INI…
