Bravo’s competitive singer-songwriter series Platinum Hit has a bizarre, almost aggressively anti-artistry streak: Each episode begins with a hook-writing contest and then the writers are broken into teams to create a hit song, because inspiration and creativity be damned, there are Top 40 jams to be plucked from the ether. Every episode forces the contestants to work in a different genre, and this week’s theme was rap. Rap! Boy were these raps terrible. As guest judge Rodney Jerkins suggested to Brian, maybe some of these people need to “spend some more time on your raps.†Damn, their science is too tight.
