6th Annual MTV Video Music Awards Thing

I’ve been doing this MTV VMA “play by play” thing for five years, and though I don’t know why I keep doing it, I’m going to keep it going because it’s the closest thing this site has to any kind of tradition. I guess that’s the same reason MTV does it too — their identity has shifted so much over the years that it’s hard to say what the brand means to its hopelessly splintered target audience, or what it has to say about a pop cultural landscape that is increasingly driven by the internet yet requires television’s big-tent audience to actually sell records in quantities large enough to qualify for any reasonable claim of mainstream success. When I was a teenager, MTV more or less dictated what was popular and cool, and the ceremony actually seemed to be a meaningful thing, in as much as the Best Video category tended to stand for some sort of artistic achievement and cultural relevance. Nowadays, they seem passive, and this show is just an awkward game of catch-up for both the network, and an audience that cherry picks whatever interests them from the mainstream, and totally ignores the rest, so you get a lot of “Really? That’s popular?” and “Wait, what, those guys are still around?”

9:00 Britney Spears is trying pretty hard to remember her own choreography. Everything is slow and obviously half-hearted. She’s barely trying, every movement is like a shrug. Her body appears to be airbrushed, but in fairness, this is the best she’s looked in a long time. Rihanna just gave a reaction shot to the effect of “Ha ha, I can blow this shit off the stage!”

9:04 Wow, this is the best Sarah Silverman has been in five forevers! Great stuff.

9:09 Alicia Keys is looking slick. Like, coated in salad oil.

9:11 Best Single About A Monster goes to………”Umbrella,” with 9% of the vote. Fun fact: Rihanna has the same haircut as Storm from the X-Men circa the late 90s, but y’know, not all white and stuff.

9:17 “You just saw Britney phone in her new single on the VMAs, and now you can phone in and get it as a ring tone…”

9:23 Quadruple Threat = Sing, Dance, Fuck, and Snort Cocaine?

9:24 Hey, Justin Timberlake does all of those things! Good for him!

9:26 So I think the idea is that big stars like Kanye West, Foo Fighters, Timbaland, Fall Out Boy, and uh, Mark Ronson are doing all these little cutaway performances in lieu of one big appearance in order to have a more pervasive presence throughout the broadcast, and thus boosting the number of “impressions” on the audience. It’s the same idea as having a Pepsi ad every commercial break.

9:33 If 50 Cent and Kanye West kissed just now, America would have been a new nation overnight.

9:42 Chris Brown is aiming for Charlie Chaplin, but I’m afraid most people are just looking at this and thinking “spazzy black Hitler.”

9:47 And yes, Rihanna blew Britney (and honestly, everyone else) off the stage within 10 seconds of emerging from her Op Art vortex.

9:55 By staging the event at The Palms Casino in Las Vegas, the VMAs have showed not only a tremendous lack of creativity, but are fully giving into the consumerist American ideal that they once at least pretended to reject by proudly holding a carrot at length from their impressionable and primarily middle class audience. When I was a young teenager it seemed as though their message was “fuck the carrot,” but now they are decisively imploring, “you better get on that carrot.”

9:57 I would stop hating Timbaland for five minutes if he and Justin Timberlake announced that they just got back from getting married in Massachusetts.

9:58 Justin Timberlake is getting old, you guys. He’s part of the Older Generation On MTV.

10:06 Shia Le Beauf. Do we all like this guy? Or do we just like saying “La Buff”? Okay, no we don’t like him cos he’s shilling for George effing Lucas. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull — Indiana Jones has to infiltrate a ring of LARPers?

10:09 Unlike Britney Spears, Kanye West can rock a stairwell.

10:13 Kanye West would win if he had arrived at this wearing a t-shirt reading “George Bush doesn’t care about the VMAs.”

10:16 Can we talk about fucking offensive these Chevy ads are? “If you want to save the environment, you can smoke pot and eat granola and practice free love you FUCKING FAGGOT HIPPIE? WHY DON’T YOU GO COMPOST YOUR TOILET, HUH?” Ending with the assertion “Chevy: We’re thinking about making a hybrid, someday, once we find that legal pad with all our notes on it. We’ve got something called ‘wireless crapability.’ You’ll love it.”

10:18 “Who is Eugene Montross?” Sorry bro, but I’m not Googling that!

10:19 Here’s our “maestro,” Timbaland. I cringe so hard whenever I see people refer to Timbaland as being ahead of his time or whatever because that’s so not true! No one is more OF HIS TIME than him, and frankly, that time was in the late 90s/early 00s and he’s been coasting ever since. The reason he can get anything remotely weird on the airwaves is simply because his formula became mainstream and now it’s just something expected, the way the shitty post-grunge stuff like Nickelback and Daughtry is expected on rock radio.

10:23 You know, Linkin Park, this is the VMAs. You definitely want to bring your A-game. This isn’t the VMB or C’s.

10:24 Here are the guys from Entourage. You know, I’ve seen every single episode of Entourage, and I don’t even know why. I have HBO, and I watch it. It’s not even a guilty pleasure, it’s just a guilty…thing I do.

10:31 Rihanna is doing “Shut Up and Drive” with Fall Out Boy in a hotel suite. It’s cool despite the obvs lip-synching gaff. I like Rihanna a lot more than usual tonight!

10:37 I was totally zzzzzing through this Alicia Keys performance, and then she started singing “Freedom 90,” and though it’s not that great or anything, it’s a step up for sure.

10:45 Jamie Foxx just spit in Jennifer Garner’s eye, ladies and gentlemen!

10:46 Wow, I thought they were just about to play the severely coked-up Foxx off the stage just now with that beat! Unfortunately, no.

10:47 Listen Jamie, when you’re being called out on your unprofessionalism by Jennifer Garner, it’s time to really take stock!

10:49 Note to New York Times ombudsman: Now that 50 Cent has made the vast majority of his fortune from Vitamin Water, please delete all references to “hip hop star 50 Cent” and replace them with “beverage magnate 50 Cent.” Thank you.

10:57 Dr. Dre is either really effing strong, or wearing a heavy kevlar Batman suit under his shirt.

11:00 Rihanna wins Video of the Year, and Kanye West is already pouting about it. One of the Daft Punk robots is knocking at Kanye’s bathroom door with a message scrolling along its LED visor: KANYE…NOT COOL…PARTY WAITING.

Okay, so a few hours later, it’s pretty obvious that the definitive moment of this year’s show came within the first two minutes.

In this still, a limp Britney Spears is being helped up a small flight of stairs by one of her back-up dancers. From this moment, there was no saving her performance, or her career. In this moment of tragically forseeable laziness, Britney set the tone for a night that was two parts apathy and one part toxic entitlement.

Beverage magnate 50 Cent is stunned!!!

Rihanna’s friend: “Can you believe this shit?”

Rihanna: I WIN

This post was co-written with Chris Conroy, Erik Bryan, and Heather Rasley.