Last Thursday MTV hosted the 2012 Video Music Awards. If there is anything that can be taken away from the VMAs it’s that popular musicians in the U.S. don’t even need to try anymore.
I’m not a huge fan of pop music (albeit, when “Call Me Maybe” comes on, I’ll drop everything and sing along), so my watching of the VMAs was mostly a fluke. In fact, I stayed tuned to MTV during the award show because so much about the ceremony felt wrong.
After sitting through a few hours of overly processed and largely prerecorded performances, in conjunction with overtly pompous artists, the magic of the VMAs quickly faded for me.
Lip-synching live performances used to be a practice that was frowned upon, even for huge artists, but it is now apparently commonplace. It seemed like half of the VMAs performances would begin with live singing, cut to an already recorded track for the majority of the song, and then end live again.
Only three years ago Britney Spears was getting ripped apart by critics for lip-synching at her shows, so this complacency for pop live performances is a recent development.
Pink was possibly the most obvious example of someone performing at the VMAs using a backing track this year, and many of her vocal parts were clearly recorded.
This wasn’t hard to pick up either, especially once her drummer started playing a different beat than what was coming out of the speakers, or when she took the microphone away from her mouth and the lyrics kept going.
I can understand the reasoning for why Pink’s performance was lip-synched, or just over-filtered—in certain parts, she was all over the stage and even swung across the concert hall like a trapeze artist on a giant rope swing. It is the “Video” Music Awards, thus the visual element of each performance is clearly important, but allowing artists to pop in a tape instead of actually playing seems like a sacrilege to live music.
Despite their juvenile image and uncanny resemblance to the Backstreet Boys, a style that apparently won’t die, British sensation One Direction was one of the only groups to adhere to a certain standard that should be synonymous with award shows.
No, it was not their heavy voice manipulation while performing the appropriately named hit “One Thing,” (although they didn’t fail to deliver in that category). The winners of “Best Pop Video” honors were one of the only groups that had the courtesy to thank anyone when receiving their award. Now, the VMAs are not the Grammys, and I don’t expect Moonman winners to prepare elegant acceptance speeches. But saying thanks to the people who helped you along doesn’t seem like too much to ask. If for no other reason, it would be better if the idols of millions of American teens showed some humbleness and humility instead of being so conceited by simply taking their prize and moving on.
The VMAs radiate a vibe of being contrived, and that the ceremony exists for the sole purpose of making money. Obviously there’s nothing wrong with wanting to turn a profit, but I’m not sure the VMAs, in addition to the popular music industry in general, go about this in the right way.
It seems like once music, a medium that can evoke myriad emotions in people, is broken down so it’s nothing but an assembly line, where songs are written, produced and performed by a prescribed formula, it ceases to be art at all. I have a pretty good guess as to what is on someone’s mind when they name their label Cash Money Records. People should expect the pop industry to do a little bit more than just take their money, but at the moment an indifferent audience is allowing standards to drop.
While the VMAs are traditionally a goldmine for controversy—this year highlighted by Rebel Wilson’s rambunctious pube-kini T-shirt—any legitimate interest in music (or music videos for that matter) gets overshadowed. Besides being borderline ridiculous, I wouldn’t call the VMAs a joke, per se, but more so a synecdoche for pop music’s continual migration away from artistic expression and more towards becoming an institution that is nothing more than a money machine.
Disagree with Andy? Still think “Laguna Beach” was totally unscripted? Email him at aholsteen@wisc.edu.
