VMA Overplay
Now that the VMA's are in heavier rotation than Oprah rolling down a steep hill, I have seen enough to pass some judgements about the state of our society.
As I mentioned before the Video Music Awards are pretty much a paradox because MTV no longer plays music videos. Where they get the content for the awards boggles my mind. They must have done a lot of searches on google and youtube to find videos for competiton. It does not really matter because the Video Music Awards are not really about Videos or Music. It is MTV demonstrating its megolmania by showing how popular they are as a media source. During the show MTV goes through celebrities like a college freshman goes through toilet paper. A typical sequence goes like this: Celebrity Host (in this case Jack Black), does something obnoxious to get 150 pity laughs. Then he introduces the next celebrity (say Paris Hilton) using some joke that a copy writer spent two hours perfecting. That celebrity takes the next minute to:
A. Plug their next movie/cd/tv show.
B. Squash some rumor swirling about them in the tabloids.
C. Giving a shout out to God, a geographic segment, their entourage, their mother, or Diddy.
D. Annouce what other celebrity they would like to sleep with in the audience.
Paris Hilton selects to do E. All of the above. After she does her obligitory self-love sequence, she gets around to introducing a Musical guest. Apparently Jack Black could not introduce the musical guest himself, so we got Paris Hilton to do it because she is such a fucking eloquent speaker. Paris introduces some mediocre act. The performance features hired models dancing around and members of the audience flashing cell phones sponsored by some company. After they are finished, Jack Black will do his stichk again introducing yet another pair of celebrities. They will akwardly read off the teleprompter and deliver some "artist" an award. That artist will thank God, his record company, his drug dealers, his mother, and Diddy. Somehow, God wanted you to win this award for rapping about having sex with strippers, selling drugs, and your platinum grill. Just like God wanted the Patriots to score that touchdown, and just like God wanted me to get a free burrito last week. When said "artist" is done with their speech we cut to a 15 minute commercial break and then go through the sequence again with different celebrities.
As if the event and the process wasn't stupid enough we get to see what is in style. Here are the trends that I gathered from this year.
1. Bling on regular cotton shirts: Apparently bedazzling is back with a vengenece. If you want to outshine the competition all you need to do is get out your glue gun and raid your local hobby lobby. Three hours later voila' you are more hip hop than Tiffany.
2. Stunna Shades: So what if it is 8:00 pm in Radio City Music Hall? The sun is out in Tokyo, and Kanye and Diddy aren't willing to risk any UV damage. Besides with all that bling in the air you better get out your sunglasses.
3. Theater Rock: Apparently the rock community is appealing to the theater, band, and outcast crowd. Gone are the days of mysoginistic, kick you in the balls metal, or dirty depressed hard rock. In are fruity haircuts, Victorian productions, and lyrics that talk about how hard it is to be working on stage crew.
4. Axl Rose: Axl was a hero of mine. He proved that skinny redheads from the midwest can rock harder than anyone else. He was the baddest mother fucker on the planet and he knew it. He created epic music, epic videos, and lived like a rock star in fairy tales. Unfortunately, my respect ended for him when he showed up on yet another VMA trying to rekindle the success that he self destructed over ten years ago. Axl your not a nice guy and until you reunite the band you will never be cool again.
The future of music does not look bright. There is a lot of over indulgence in pop and hip hop. If I had all the resources in the world right now the first thing I would do is create a major cable station that rivals MTV's target audience. MTV has so much power because they control such a precious demographic for marketers. No other cable network appeals to youth audiences like MTV does, but MTV provides the worst programming out there. MTV's main competition is owned by the same parent communications company, that is why VH1, MTV2, CMT, and all the other networks are getting shittier and shittier. But MTV will continue to flourish because marketers will pour any amount of money to get in touch with their audience.
The one though provoking item of the evening was the night's opening act Justin Timberlake. Between his performance and me listening to Michael Jackson's Number Ones on my ipod I had a revelation.
Is Justin Timberlake the male best pop icon of our generation? Without a doubt Michael Jackson is the pop icon of generation X. (I am talking Michael Jackson back when he made good music, before all the plastic surgeries and sleeping with children.) To this day if you throw on Michael Jackson at any wedding or party, no matter what race the majority of the people in the room will be in favor of the music. Sure everyone will make a comment here or there, but there is no denying that is great dance music.
With his recent performance, I elevated Justin to a poor man's version of Michael Jackson up from a homeless man (to use the parlance of the sports guy). Even when he was with 'NSYNC Justin had a recognizable talent that was far above all of his boyband peers. There was not another person from that generation that compared including backstreet, 47* calvin, OurTown t. I hate to say that I am able to analyze boy bands this well, but we were inundated with that shit.
Justin is a couple hit singles away from getting up to that Michael Jackson quality where he could be liked by anyone. He is pretty close with songs like Rock Your Body and Cry Me a River. I am not saying that Justin will ever come close to a Thriller, Bad, Billie Jean, Smooth Criminal, or Beat It. But he could certainly get up to some wearker singles like The Way You Make Me Feel, or Can't Stop Loving You.
Justin still has a very long way to go before he gets to that level. Right now he doesn't even have the best songs of his generation. Kanye West, Outkast, and Pharrel are blowing him out of the water. However, Justin has the performance ability and cross cultural appeal that could elevate him above his peers given the right music. The key to Michael Jackson's success in capturing white America was his use of heavy rock and blues elements in his music. A lot of Michael Jackson's songs had a fundamental rock sound, Beat It and Black or White even had full fledged guitar solos. Michael Jackson may be insane now, but at one point he was a musical genius.
If Justin Timberlake can demonstrate some of that song production in his next record we may have a lesser version of Thriller on our hands. Who knows maybe 10 years from now we will be dancing to his songs at our weddings, and college students will be requesting JT's greatest hits at the bowling alley. I am not saying we have another Michael Jackson on our hands, far from it.
But, he may be smarter than we think, after all he knew when to break up with Britney Spears.
As I mentioned before the Video Music Awards are pretty much a paradox because MTV no longer plays music videos. Where they get the content for the awards boggles my mind. They must have done a lot of searches on google and youtube to find videos for competiton. It does not really matter because the Video Music Awards are not really about Videos or Music. It is MTV demonstrating its megolmania by showing how popular they are as a media source. During the show MTV goes through celebrities like a college freshman goes through toilet paper. A typical sequence goes like this: Celebrity Host (in this case Jack Black), does something obnoxious to get 150 pity laughs. Then he introduces the next celebrity (say Paris Hilton) using some joke that a copy writer spent two hours perfecting. That celebrity takes the next minute to:
A. Plug their next movie/cd/tv show.
B. Squash some rumor swirling about them in the tabloids.
C. Giving a shout out to God, a geographic segment, their entourage, their mother, or Diddy.
D. Annouce what other celebrity they would like to sleep with in the audience.
Paris Hilton selects to do E. All of the above. After she does her obligitory self-love sequence, she gets around to introducing a Musical guest. Apparently Jack Black could not introduce the musical guest himself, so we got Paris Hilton to do it because she is such a fucking eloquent speaker. Paris introduces some mediocre act. The performance features hired models dancing around and members of the audience flashing cell phones sponsored by some company. After they are finished, Jack Black will do his stichk again introducing yet another pair of celebrities. They will akwardly read off the teleprompter and deliver some "artist" an award. That artist will thank God, his record company, his drug dealers, his mother, and Diddy. Somehow, God wanted you to win this award for rapping about having sex with strippers, selling drugs, and your platinum grill. Just like God wanted the Patriots to score that touchdown, and just like God wanted me to get a free burrito last week. When said "artist" is done with their speech we cut to a 15 minute commercial break and then go through the sequence again with different celebrities.
As if the event and the process wasn't stupid enough we get to see what is in style. Here are the trends that I gathered from this year.
1. Bling on regular cotton shirts: Apparently bedazzling is back with a vengenece. If you want to outshine the competition all you need to do is get out your glue gun and raid your local hobby lobby. Three hours later voila' you are more hip hop than Tiffany.
2. Stunna Shades: So what if it is 8:00 pm in Radio City Music Hall? The sun is out in Tokyo, and Kanye and Diddy aren't willing to risk any UV damage. Besides with all that bling in the air you better get out your sunglasses.
3. Theater Rock: Apparently the rock community is appealing to the theater, band, and outcast crowd. Gone are the days of mysoginistic, kick you in the balls metal, or dirty depressed hard rock. In are fruity haircuts, Victorian productions, and lyrics that talk about how hard it is to be working on stage crew.
4. Axl Rose: Axl was a hero of mine. He proved that skinny redheads from the midwest can rock harder than anyone else. He was the baddest mother fucker on the planet and he knew it. He created epic music, epic videos, and lived like a rock star in fairy tales. Unfortunately, my respect ended for him when he showed up on yet another VMA trying to rekindle the success that he self destructed over ten years ago. Axl your not a nice guy and until you reunite the band you will never be cool again.
The future of music does not look bright. There is a lot of over indulgence in pop and hip hop. If I had all the resources in the world right now the first thing I would do is create a major cable station that rivals MTV's target audience. MTV has so much power because they control such a precious demographic for marketers. No other cable network appeals to youth audiences like MTV does, but MTV provides the worst programming out there. MTV's main competition is owned by the same parent communications company, that is why VH1, MTV2, CMT, and all the other networks are getting shittier and shittier. But MTV will continue to flourish because marketers will pour any amount of money to get in touch with their audience.
The one though provoking item of the evening was the night's opening act Justin Timberlake. Between his performance and me listening to Michael Jackson's Number Ones on my ipod I had a revelation.
Is Justin Timberlake the male best pop icon of our generation? Without a doubt Michael Jackson is the pop icon of generation X. (I am talking Michael Jackson back when he made good music, before all the plastic surgeries and sleeping with children.) To this day if you throw on Michael Jackson at any wedding or party, no matter what race the majority of the people in the room will be in favor of the music. Sure everyone will make a comment here or there, but there is no denying that is great dance music.
With his recent performance, I elevated Justin to a poor man's version of Michael Jackson up from a homeless man (to use the parlance of the sports guy). Even when he was with 'NSYNC Justin had a recognizable talent that was far above all of his boyband peers. There was not another person from that generation that compared including backstreet, 47* calvin, OurTown t. I hate to say that I am able to analyze boy bands this well, but we were inundated with that shit.
Justin is a couple hit singles away from getting up to that Michael Jackson quality where he could be liked by anyone. He is pretty close with songs like Rock Your Body and Cry Me a River. I am not saying that Justin will ever come close to a Thriller, Bad, Billie Jean, Smooth Criminal, or Beat It. But he could certainly get up to some wearker singles like The Way You Make Me Feel, or Can't Stop Loving You.
Justin still has a very long way to go before he gets to that level. Right now he doesn't even have the best songs of his generation. Kanye West, Outkast, and Pharrel are blowing him out of the water. However, Justin has the performance ability and cross cultural appeal that could elevate him above his peers given the right music. The key to Michael Jackson's success in capturing white America was his use of heavy rock and blues elements in his music. A lot of Michael Jackson's songs had a fundamental rock sound, Beat It and Black or White even had full fledged guitar solos. Michael Jackson may be insane now, but at one point he was a musical genius.
If Justin Timberlake can demonstrate some of that song production in his next record we may have a lesser version of Thriller on our hands. Who knows maybe 10 years from now we will be dancing to his songs at our weddings, and college students will be requesting JT's greatest hits at the bowling alley. I am not saying we have another Michael Jackson on our hands, far from it.
But, he may be smarter than we think, after all he knew when to break up with Britney Spears.
posted by IrishZag at 8:51 PM
2 Comments:
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I am going to disagree. Justin Timberlake isn't the next michael (you are talking to someone, by the way, who has been in mj's fanclub since the age of 8) I think it is outkast (as a group, not just andre 3000) - take a general radio station survey: even KBCO plays outkast. and that station is run by hippies. If outkast can appeal to hippies, they can appeal to ANYONE.
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