Everything You Wanted to Know About the VMA's (But You Were Too Afraid to Ask)

I don’t know if anyone else got a chance to see the VMA’s last night, but I did and have come to one of two or three conclusions:

1. I am starting to agree with Perez Hilton on far too many points when it comes to entertainment. In other words, my musical taste and criteria for how I enjoy being entertained is now verging on Las Vegas style.
2. This entire political hullabaloo (which, by the way is giving me high blood pressure) has actually affected my blood flow so that proper oxygen to my brain has been cut off to the point that I am actually impressed by something MTV has produced.
3. “The Hills” is laced with secret MTV rhetoric which has made me softened to anything it produces (see: The Manchurian Candidate)
4. The rapidly tanking economy has actually caused the music industry to amp up what they are delivering to audiences for fear we are entering into an era when people will not be able to afford the price of a concert ticket, so they may as well bring it to television.

So, this was the 25th anniversary of the VMAs. Which means I have been drinking this kool-aid since I was nine. I saw Madonna do the whole “Like a Virgin” dance that made her famous—yes, my parents were lax in their parenting. Anyway, that means I’ve watched this show for a very loooong time. It’s like people who watch “The Wizard of Oz” every year because of nostalgia. Some years have been good, some years not so much. Such as, last year. Just a quick re-cap—Britney’s performance, Kid Rock getting in a fight with Tommy Lee and Kanye West storming out because he didn’t get an award. I can’t even recall any performances. I think everyone was either drunk, or maybe didn’t make any music last year and just decided to be jackasses full-time or something.

So, I settled in this year with arched eyebrow and armed with Time magazine so that my brain did not go completely molested. The opening was funny—Jonah Hill pretending Britney Spears was stalking him or something. That was about as interesting as Britney was all night--she seems all cleaned up and back on track to being part of the real world, but does that mean she should receive 3 VMA awards? Nay.

Let's move on to the host—Russell Brand. RB is crazy and English, and nearly stole the show with his performance in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” (it’s funny. Go see it. actually, the more I think about this, the more I realize the Judd Apatow machine was in full force as guest presenters). Anyway, RB is known for being nuts and once dating Kate Moss and being a druggie and a Don Juan and an MTV vee-jay all at once and now he does stand-up. Well, I think it’s safe to say he pretty much bit it as a presenter. It was like watching "Pulp Fiction" edited and with every f-bomb deleted. So, he was left to the “safe” topics-- jokes about he Jonas Brothers virginity* and promise rings. It was a little bit vulgar (this is MTV right??) and hearing only twitters from the crowd (except for LL Cool J who the cameraman frantically panned for every time, who seemed to be amused) I foresaw the trainwreck that lay before him so, I picked up Time and caught up on Alaskan politics**.

Poor RB. Doesn’t MTV have a culture FAQ they hand out? He did say many funny things, but it was all slightly off-key for this crowd. After reading the British tabloids, I blush. I mean it is no-holds barred talk. Like if “Deadwood” existed in tabloid form. One thing I know about the American public as a whole is that you can never be too directly mean or overtly sexual. Does he not know about the abstinence-only plans in most schools? If we can't admit openly that teenagers have sex, then there is no way we can joke about it. It's like living in an alternate universe. Sure, we like to prop up our former sweethearts, let them wear spandex and spin them out onto a stage so they perform like a drugged deer—that’s cool. But let’s not be too vulgar. Do we all need reminding of SuperBowl XXX? So, please don’t talk about wearing a promise ring as a cock ring. It makes hearts and minds explode.

In sum, RB, having lost his footing, struggled through the rest of the show with much chagrin and very snide faux happiness. He even got a ridiculously heavy-handed smack down (ala Sean Penn giving Chris Rock grief for making fun of Jude Law at the Oscars a couple years back) from Jordin Sparks who said something like “I just want to say about promise rings that not all of us, guys or girls, want to be sluts.” Huh? I managed to not wear a promise ring and made it through life without being a slut, but perhaps the rules have changed? The best part of her high-falutin’ speech came immediately after, when they cut to a T.I. performance involving a girl wearing a dress/slip so short one accidental bend too many and all would be on display. Awesome.

But enough about that. So, the whole show was at the Paramount lot. Which means they had access to a million stage sets, so the whole show came off like a very schizophrenic Christmas Special. The first performance was Rihanna who was wheeled in on top of some sort of goth-looking Aztec temple surrounded by zombie dancers. Awesome. Seriously, she is great. Like, Michael Jackson 1985 great. You could play “Umbrella” six thousand times and I would not be sick of it. Perhaps that is just my illness. As far as I’m concerned, she has thrown down the gauntlet for pop music. Which is awesome, because if you have someone who rolls on a Sunday night with their own personal Aztec temple stage and choreographed zombie dancers, then you know the fall-out has to be good. She can dance, she can sing, she wears insane clothes and does not look like a fool. Those are my only criteria for pop singers. Just please, please, don’t look like a fool (see: Christina Aguilera dipped in pancake batter in 2002).

Not sure what happened after that—I think it may have been Jonas Brothers on the back lot in which they pretended to be just three guys sitting on a NYC stoop ala Janet Jackson’s “Alright” video. Except this did not feature Cab Calloway-instead the entire brownstone split open to reveal a stage and a chaotic street scene where hundreds of Jonas Brothers fans swarmed like maniacs to groove to their virginal sounds.

Okay, so now I’m just going to cut to my favorite things:

1. I didn’t realize that Li’l Wayne was actually, well, li’l. And muscular, and just as crazy performing as his stream-of-thought-consciousness songs would make you think. I have become a big fan—some of his stuff is like when funk met techno.

2. Christina Aguilera —decidedly not dipped in pancake batter and not doing the 1940s thing anymore. Instead, she appears to be doing Rihanna meets Madonna and wears a wig by Donatella Versace. However, her performance of a re-mixed and nearly unrecognizable “Genie in a Bottle” and the fantastic Janet Jackson-esque (yep, that’s twice in one entry) style choreography in “Keeps Getting Better” was tight. That's right, I said tight. Somehow, that word fit, so I'm just going to go with it.

3. LL Cool J has his own fashion line at Sears. For kids. Let that sink in.

4. McLovin from SuperBad on the stage with Slip Knot. Anything that makes those weirdos funny is a good thing.

5. Tokio Hotel. Have you seen these kids? They are German and dress like some crazy Japanimation characters. It was like an SNL skit. But maybe I just find the German accent particularly hilarious on man-boys who wear lots of make—up. I am hoping the rise of Tokio Hotel means the fall of Fall Out Boy (no pun intended). Pete Wentz just seems like the biggest pansy to me. Almost as annoying as the reality that there is not just a Joel Madden, but a Benji too. Ugh. We can only have so many eye-linered boyes running around. This, despite what other ominous signs have pointed to do, is not the ‘80s people.

6. Kanye West’s show closing performance of “Love Lockdown.” It was like old Motown crossed with the most stripped down drumming. Very loud-quiet. Seriously, moving and really surprising (but in a good way. Like when U2 put out “Achtung Baby”). I could have done without the E.T. heart light that he wore on his lapel. However, the song itself was powerful—lyrics and music—not many people accurately describe the stakes of love, they either want to sing about getting it, wanting it, or getting over it. This was like all three. It was a very mournful song which is odd for the VMAs. I didn’t think they did mournful. I also didn’t think Kanye West did mournful, but wow. I even watched it twice.

So I made DG watch some of this with me, and, I admitted that I was really into nearly all of the music. Thinking I was on to something I said, “It just feels like I’ve gone full circle in my musical tastes. I started out loving R & B and hip-hop and pop and now all those things have come together.”

DG’s response was sobering: “Well, it just means you’re getting older. You’ve witnessed one whole cycle now. Everything is coming back in.”

I would like to believe it’s because I’m so cutting edge—but who are we kidding? I have to be honest with myself and admit that it’s okay to like pop. That’s why it’s called pop.

*Since when do popstars have to declare their virginitude? I think it’s an uneccesary trend and weirdly ancient-feeling, as in medieval.

**Perhaps I am most angry about the fact that now I need to educate myself on frickin’ ALASKAN politics. I mean COME ON. This whole thing is like “Wag the Dog,” but not funny and very, very real. I already know all about hockey moms, thank god.