If This Award Show Were a Book…

Last night, while sipping a martini at the Four Seasons and scrolling through the BET Awards nominations, I had a thought. It wasn't revolutionary — it was reverent. And in that stillness, one question echoed like a bassline in a velvet lounge:

If this award show were a book… what would it say?

Would it be a collection of unsent love letters to hip-hop’s golden age? A mixtape of memoirs from the trap to the tuxedo? A multi-generational anthology of hair grease, heartbreak, and Grammy snubs?

Or perhaps it would be what all great books strive to become — proof that we were here, that we mattered, and that our music wrote history before textbooks ever caught up.

At Upland Studios, we don’t just publish books. We bottle eras. We turn sonic memory into page-bound mythology. And this month, as the world eyes the BET Awards with gold-tinged admiration, we couldn’t help but join the conversation — not with RSVP wristbands, but with a literary lens.

So we created something — because when you're not in the room, you write your way in.

Introducing the “If This Album Were a Book…” Series: The BET Awards Edition.

It’s part imagination, part homage — a love letter to the albums that raised us, styled us, saved us. Beyoncé’s Renaissance reimagined as a ballroom manifesto wrapped in chrome-foil dust jacket. Usher’s Confessions as a Southern Gothic confessional printed on cologne-scented paper. Kendrick Lamar’s entire catalog recast as a postmodern trilogy, annotated by street philosophers and Pulitzer spirits.

This is where music meets memoir, where lyrics turn literary, and where the record player and bookshelf share a sacred corner of your room.

For us, this isn’t content. This is canon.

And as the founder of a studio obsessed with preserving culture’s most interesting stories — whether on the stage, in a gallery, or between hardback covers — I believe the BET Awards are more than a broadcast. They are a bound collection of becoming. Each performance, a chapter. Each acceptance speech, a foreword in Black brilliance.

So no, we won't be on the red carpet this year.

But we’ll be right here — dressed in meaning, dipped in metaphor, and pressing “send” on a sampler that we hope you’ll keep, share, and cherish.

Because if this award show were a book…

You’d find us printed in the margins.

With admiration for the culture that raised us,

April Sheris

President,

Upland Studios

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✨ Read the series of “🎤 If This Album Were a Book… The BET Awards Edition” A visual celebration of albums reimagined as books — from SZA’s SOS to Silk Sonic’s 70s soul novella.

📩 Share it. Save it. Sip something steeped in storytelling.