The VMAs Are Painfully Irrelevant. Here's What MTV Can Do to Save Them.

The network's thirst for virality is obvious, but will it pan out?

Photo illustration by Ben Boskovich

Despite assurances of "holy crap moments" from Rihanna and alerts that Kanye West will get four minutes to save the world, the runup to this Sunday's Video Music Awards—the 32nd running of MTV's annual fantasia of surprise guests and saps to its music-centric roots, if you're keeping count—has seemed slightly subdued.

Perhaps it's the muddle of election news, where outrageous statements suck up not some peoples' social media feeds and others' will to live. Maybe it's the weird place that pop is in and has been in for a while now, with megastars like Beyoncé and Frank Ocean losing radio airplay slots—and, thus, cultural space—to nothingburgers like Meghan Trainor and Charlie Puth. Or maybe it's just that the VMAs, now nearing the dreaded territory of "middle age," don't really represent youth culture the way they once did. (The definition of "youth culture" was such back then that Bette Midler and Dan Aykroyd, who hosted the first ceremony all the way back in 1984, were MTV's answer to "who you gonna call?" It was a different time.)

Ostensibly an opportunity for MTV and various fan armies to honor the best promotional clips of the year, this year's Video Music Awards are a muddle of shout-outs to celebrity and virality, with the occasional producer's pick thrown in. Was Adele's flip-phone-centric "Hello," nominated for Video of the Year and six other categories, really that good, or are its slate-leading nominations coming from the fact that the artist behind it can heal wounds between family members? Is there any point to not giving every award to every clip from the sumptuous Lemonade, including the new category of Breakthrough Longform Video Of The Year, which seems expressly designed to give Beyoncé extra arm candy? Is there any point to any other artist going up against Beyoncé's platinum-plated productions, especially since the virality-on-a-budget template established by OK Go has been figured out by a slew of marketing agencies who are ready to unleash an army of Shawn Mendeses on the world?

Kanye West onstage during the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards
Michael TranGetty Images

Okay, deep breath. I am fully aware that there's no significant amount of silliness to arguing over the particulars of any award that isn't determined by non-jukable statistics. (That means anything subject to swaying via click farming is out of the running—sorry, YouTube play counts.) The Video Music Awards can be fun; at their best, they allow artists to go all-in with career-redefining spectacles. Think Lady Gaga's "Paparazzi" in 2009, which, despite being overshadowed in the popular memory by a still-ensuing spat over who deserved the Best Female Artist trophy, ushered in the "Bad Romance" era of audacity through sick beats. Or, heck, even Kanye announcing himself as a 2020 Presidential candidate, a proclamation that seems even more likely to bear out in the waning days of the Trump campaign. The trophies, which are mostly relegated to the pre-show and the bumpers into and out of commercial, are meaningful to some—superfans, choreographers, pool photographers looking for extra sparkle in their shots—but more and more they seem like a vestigial tail, one that's managed to persist despite an ever-more-crowded pop world and ever-shorter attention spans.

With the awards themselves dealing with so wide a berth as to be meaningless, would the VMAs be better off as a regular variety show airing on MTV and all its various platforms?

With the awards themselves dealing with so wide a berth as to be meaningless, would the VMAs be better off as a regular variety show airing on MTV and all its various platforms? Make it a quarterly thing so that the patina of "special event" is still there, à la World Wrestling Entertainment's big-deal pay-per-view broadcasts like WrestleMania and SummerSlam. Have big performances that are once-in-a-career, although maybe cool off on the "surprise guest" thing, which muddles the waters of promotional intent a bit too much. Rotate the hosts, but keep them consistent, and make sure they can ad-lib should artists go off-script and ask them "what's good."

In the era of YouTube being an essential promotional strategy, there are certainly enough videos released by big-name and up-and-coming artists to even have, say, 10 or so that are honored in some way—shoot, Beyoncé released Lemonade, in which every track had a visual accompaniment, in April, and followed it up with a full version of "Sorry" in June. Chop them up and talk over them TRL-style, perhaps even with explanations of why the editing in Fergie's "M.I.L.F. $" (a Best Editing nominee alongside "Hello," Beyoncé's "Formation," David Bowie's "Lazarus," and Ariana Grande's "Into You") was a towering achievement, with viewers secure in the knowledge that they can watch them in full online somewhere, industry types happy that their profession's ins and outs are being explained, and advertisers breathing a sigh of relief that people just outside of the demographic won't be moved to change the channel when a video by Drake or Ariana Grande comes on. There can even be trophies, just to ensure that nobody feels left out.

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