“MEMES MEMES MEMES MEMES MEMES MEMES MEMES!”
So spoke Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, taking the form of Statler-and-Waldorf-via-Twitter-egg personae LizardSheeple and TheShamester, summarizing the State of the VMAs for us all, ad infinitum. It’s worth remembering at this point that things could be worse. It’s also worth remembering that things could be much better. Every awards show is inevitably hailed as the Worst Ever, but the 2016 VMAs didn’t come close; they were just understuffed. Namely:
Meta-Meme Morass
It’s a weird time for the VMAs. It’s hard to get A-listers to attend, as some have noted, being limited not only by release cycles but the increasing difficulty of offering artists something they can’t do themselves, better and with more control, via their social-media-walled gardens. The most exciting videos are released by those very artists, and the rest tend to be rush jobs. Then there’s the network’s confusion as to how to rebrand itself—#woke, but open to conservative eyeballs; social media savvy, but performatively weird; celeb-obsessed, but also so over it.
What this looks like in practice is a ceremony interrupted every few seconds for its own “I Love the 30 Seconds Ago”clip show. Standout performances are expensive; memes are cheap. (Even though memes tend to come from standout performances, but never mind that.) Perhaps there was a good idea in this, but the human brain just isn’t built to unravel this many layers of irony and self-awareness and ironic self-awareness, especially if that brain just wants to watch some musicians.
The Beyoncé and Rihanna Show
Complaining that MTV isn’t about the music is the sort of statement that, once spoke, causes an angel to materialize in your room, plop a Lochte wig on your scalp and shove you on stage to dad it up alongside Jimmy Fallon. And yet! Beyoncé’s Lemonade set was a masterwork of high solemnity and actual caring amid the memes. It had everything: sumptuous staging, the sort of choreography that’ll appear in VMA write-ups 20 years from now, and enough runtime to include the Warsan Shire interludes (mostly) intact. None of this was surprising for anyone who’s come within earshot of the album or watched any of her other VMA appearances. But the set’s placement was puzzling, as it was unceremoniously dropped into the middle of the ceremony and followed up by televised shitposting and Britney Spears groping a white rapper named G-Eazy. Yes, Beyoncé closed the show the last time she had a masterwork set, but that just goes to show: Who else is even capable of staging something at this level?
Video Vanguard winner Rihanna’s performance, meanwhile, was inexplicably diced into four medleys, frontloaded with her flimsiest pop tracks. Nothing from ANTI was played until set two; her R&B tracks were mostly relegated to set three. The intention was probably to showcase her versatility; the actual effect was like watching two artists, one magnetic if unpolished, the other barely singing amid a pink bubblegum hellscape. (Unintended side effect: showcasing just how disparate the pop and urban radio markets are, for the usual questionable reasons.)
Tributes in Memoriam
Given that these are the VMAs, you would expect there to be a Prince tribute. There was not. You would expect there to be a David Bowie tribute. Aside from a cursory win for Art Direction, there was not. You would not necessarily expect there to be an extended segment of Nick Jonas commandeering a 24-hour diner to sing about bacon, but so it goes.
Figures of Speech
The main hype going into the VMAs was that Kanye West would receive four minutes onstage to say whatever he wanted, a thing known in elite broadcasting circles as “a speech.” And a speech it was, in every scripted sense of the word: interspersing serious commentary (“There are three keys to keeping people impoverished: taking away their esteem, taking away their resources, and taking away their role models.”) with Shamester-level jokes (“‘Famous’ might lose to Beyoncé, but I can't be mad. I'm always wishing for Beyoncé to win!”); veering from Chicago murders to conciliatory remarks toward Taylor Swift, who picked a great time not to have an album to promote; getting around to a video premiere “introducing” Teyana Taylor, who’s been kicking around the industry for the better part of a decade; bowing out so said video could be drooled over on by Shamester and Sheeple ironically telling bad masturbation jokes, which is ultimately just telling bad masturbation jokes.
In fact, for a year arguably more politically charged than any in the past couple decades, and for a network that’s historically made points even during the most polarized of political climates, the VMAs were notably barren of any kind of statements. Beyoncé showed up with the mothers of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Oscar Grant, began her set with dancers being struck by invisible bullets and falling into pools of red light, and ended it with a Busby Berkeley female symbol, but her actual speech was a couple of seconds of thanking the usual suspects. Rihanna’s speech, specifically celebrating black women, had more substance, though it’s been well overshadowed by Drake memes (again).
Pop Stars of the Future
The #1 song in America right now is not by Beyoncé. Nor is it by Rihanna. It’s “Closer,” brought to life as a would-be standout moment by the Chainsmokers fratting all over the stage and Halsey doing her best to feign attraction. If you believe the charts, the Chainsmokers are more successful than anything off Lemonade. Something is clearly off here, but good luck finding it in the mess of streaming qualifications and radio-add politics and audience metric feedback loops and celebrity follower-count triage and mutations of payola that determine the charts. The problem is when the VMAs take it seriously.
Take one song we heard about six times through the night, mostly in commercials: Flume’s radio hit “Never Be Like You,” specifically its tense-to-snapping chorus by Canadian vocalist Kai, who was nowhere to be found. But we did get Olympic athletes, Jimmy Fallon pretending to be an Olympic athlete, and Ansel Elgort, whose claim to fame is acting, releasing some relatively low-profile remixes, and being named Ansel Elgort. This is how pop works in 2016: artists, mostly women, sing the hooks and maybe get credited if they’re lucky; producers, mostly men, get the royalties and name recognition; stars become stars by increasingly extra musical avenues; forward-thinking pop music gets made regardless, but only those lucky enough to predate or transcend this system get credit for it. The most apt summary of all might be Britney Spears’ uncommitted lip-synching of Bebe Rexha’s chorus to “Me, Myself and I”—a song she wasn’t even on.