Monday, September 13, 2010

MTV Video Music Awards are the definition of lackluster

Last week, I blogged about how Lady Gaga would make the VMAs great. Well, Gaga's impressive eight wins last night, including Video of the Year, did yield some highlights in the show, including her so-called "meat dress":



Sadly, the rest of the show was fairly boring. Gaga did not perform, which took away some of the mystique in the evening. Justin Bieber sounded off-key, and nearly every other performance involved Auto-Tune and lip syncing. Not to mention, they were fairly boring.

Was Taylor Swift's performance really necessary? I understand that it would have been awful for something like that to happen to her. However, I just feel as though it was completely tacky to compose and (poorly) perform such a maudlin song over something that, in the grand scheme of her career, didn't exactly hurt. I feel like a cover of Natalie Merchant's "Thank You" would have been more fitting, because Kanye West's interruption of her speech made everyone elicit an outrageous amount of sympathy for her. Then again, why fault her for believing the hype?

However, no matter whether one thought harping on the past was necessary it's difficult to argue that she didn't sound great. Which is what is sad about the VMAs and music as a whole: we complain that people lip sync and use AutoTune. But why do they do that? Because they sound like Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift. Minus the very talented and charismatic Florence and the Machine and Robyn, each performance was rather lacking.

Host Chelsea Handler wasn't give a whole lot to do, but when she was on stage, she had some good one-liners. I think Kanye West's Twitter account should have hosted the show.

Usually when it comes to late summer-early fall award shows, the Emmys are far superior to the VMAs. Last year with the travesty of Jon Cryer winning an Emmy and the overall boring nature of the presenters, the VMAs were quite entertaining. However, this year things went back to normal. MTV just can't capture the magic they used to have. The show wasn't terrible like June's Movie Awards, just boring.

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