So, I finally had a chance to recap the MTV Video Music Awards and by that I mean recap my lack of understanding of the modern video music industry. Maybe I am that old. Miley Cyrus in an Atelier Versace outfit that looks like the 5th Element made love with Thunderdome is just wrong. Not because she’s too young or any of that standard crap. No, I hate it because she’s straight up not sexy enough to pull it off.
Miley Cyrus looks like a Raggedy Ann doll done up in a bunch of different outfits–badly. Supposedly, the entire gamut of looks are ‘her’ but I think what all of it reveals is that there is no ‘her’ and in that no personality in her sound or stage presence. She is trying hard to be someone who is noticed and over the top and it doesn’t feel genuine. Cnn said it best when they called her the ‘garish avatar of the American id.‘
This is my real argument: Music doesn’t feel genuine in the MTV realm. From Taylor Swift’s Bad Blood to Drakes, well, anything that he creates. The music seems false and prepared. There are several genuine artists on the music scene coming out with something genuine to say–even if what is real to them sounds poppy to the world (See: Call me maybe). The music scene has lost a lot of its authenticity and thus its credibility.
This is why Kanye can run for president. If we are willing to continually follow along with a series of songs and artists who, for all intents and purposes, are as vapid as an average K-pop band, we might have a generation just brazen enough to elect that dude.
Lost in all this is the efforts by Nicki Minaj to address an attack by Cyrus that basically amounted to being belittled as an ‘Angry Black Chick’. So, what did her response wind up doing? Making her seem more like an angry black chick, of course. Instead it should have reconfirmed the flagging identity of the MTV viewer and this incumbent sense of American slippage back into a period of time where we just don’t get it.
We were on the verge of something big–between civil rights for all and finding our purpose on the world stage. One glance at MTV and I’m starting to think that all that was illusion and we are still chasing that next popular pretty face.