If the casual exposure to pop culture that seeps into our bones like radiation didn’t inform you, then let us repeat: Kanye West made an ass of himself at the MTV Video Music Awards this past Sunday, interrupting Taylor Swift while she was accepting the award for Best Female Video for “You Belong With Me.”
Yo, Taylor. I’m really happy for you; I’mma let you finish. But Beyonce had one of the best music videos of all time! One of the best videos of all time!
Is there anything within this perfect storm of pop – self-promoting MC, neo-country tweener star, gorgeous musical diva and the station that no longer plays music videos – that merits overthinking? Maybe. Perhaps if we stretch.
Oh, who are we kidding? This is rife with opportunity.
1. Best Female Video
Why do the VMAs give an award for “Best Female Video”?
That the VMAs have any prestige at all has always seemed odd. The network that awards the Video Music Awards – MTV – is also the single largest broadcaster of music videos. It seems a bit disingenuous to lump consumption, distribution and acclaim in the same venue. It would be like Paramount giving out Paramount Movie Awards, all of the nominees being Paramount pictures by some odd coincidence, and then claiming that these awards had gone to the best movies of the year.
But pop culture awards don’t need a rigorous logic to justify them. Awards exist in order to have award ceremonies.
Awards ceremonies are an easy way of showering the biggest stars in a genre – movies, music, short movies that play music – with more attention. Everyone dresses up in high fashion, parades down the red carpet for hours before hand, and gets free interview time later about how great it was to win (winners) or what an honor it was just to be nominated (losers). And since popular artists require a spotlight to survive, an event with free publicity justifies itself.
Given that award ceremonies are a necessary part of the industry, anything which prolongs an award ceremony is also justified. And nothing prolongs an award ceremony like needlessly multiplying awards.
The 2009 MTV Video Music Awards gave out honors for each of the following categories:
- Video of the Year
- Best Male Video
- Best Female Video
- Best New Artist
- Best Pop Video
- Best Rock Video
- Best Hip-Hop Video
- Breakthrough Video
- Best Direction In A Video
- Best Choreography in a Video
- Best Special Effects in a Video
- Best Art Direction in a Video
- Best Editing in a Video
- Best Cinematography in a Video
- Best Video (That Should Have Won a Moonman)
Is the distinction between Breakthrough Video and Best New Artist worth heralding? Why are separate awards given for Best Rock Video, Best Hip-Hop Video and Best Pop Video – especially since every Pop Video worth watching these days draws heavily on rock or hip-hop? And isn’t Best Video That Should Have Won a Moonman too paradoxical for the young?
Most importantly: why Best Male and Best Female Videos? Are these simply categories added to inflate the total number of awards? Or is there something that distinguishes a Male Video from a Female Video, other than the gender of its star?
One obvious distinction: you never see a male star rolling around nude in a music video, erogenous zones obscured by glitter.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5-ZiNwv6kI
2. One Of The Best Videos of All Time
Was Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)” really one of the best videos of all time?
Consider the following:
1. “Single Ladies” was nominated both for Best Video and Best Female Video. Beyoncé actually won the Best Video award, announced later in the evening. Nominating the same video for two very similar categories makes voting complicated. If you consider Best Video a higher honor than Best Female Video, however, then we might consider this a crude approximation of Condorcet method voting. So perhaps Kanye was right.
2. And yet, as several pop connoisseurs have pointed out for months, “Single Ladies” is almost a shot-for-shot remake of Gwen Verdon’s “Mexican Breakfast,” choreographed by Bob Fosse. Consult the video below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRm4evmgz4I
Beyoncé acknowledged the similarity in recent interviews, saying she was “inspired” by Fosse. And there’s nothing wrong with taking inspiration from the great directors and choreographers of the past. All art steals from prior art, and music videos are no exception.
But is a video that borrows so heavily from a prior work really the best in a given year? Is originality not a voting criteria? So perhaps Kanye was wrong.
3. I’mma Let You Finish
And of course, we have the spectacle of Kanye himself.
West has a history of making an ass of himself when awards are involved. He interrupted the American Music Awards in 2004 to insist he should have won the Best Male Rap/Hip-Hop Artist title (he didn’t; Jay-Z did). He announced that he would “really have a problem” if he didn’t win the 2006 Grammy Award for Best Album of the Year (he didn’t; U2 did). He rushed the stage of the MTV Europe Music Awards later that year, arguing that he should have won the Best Video of the Year award (he didn’t; Justice and Simian did).
So West grabbing the mic is nothing new. And yet:
(all images courtesy of kanyegate.tumblr.com)
Why has this meme taken off in a way that his other rants haven’t? A few theories:
(1) This is the first time West threw such a tantrum in defense of another artist. The pretentiousness of Mr. West, self-appointed advocate for a pop star who doesn’t need advocacy, begs for satire.
(2) Not only that but, as mentioned above, he threw this tantrum needlessly. The voters agreed with him. Beyoncé did, in their eyes, make one of the best music videos – of the past year, if not all time.
(3) The sheer ridiculousness of his approach. If Kanye were genuinely happy for Taylor Swift and wanted her to finish her speech, he could have shown that more sincerely by applauding from his seat and letting her finish her speech. To take a microphone from someone and claim that they received an award incorrectly, yet you’re “happy for them,” approaches unheard-of levels of paralepsis.
(4) The Internet has changed. 2006 might not seem like that long ago, but social media, online publishing and Photoshop capabilities have exploded since then. More people have access to online platforms and ways to manipulate video, sound and image than they did the last time Kanye acted the fool. Blog posts, image macros, Facebook updates and YouTube videos can blow an incident up faster and keep it alive longer.
The Aftermath
No artist ever lost the limelight for being too ridiculous. Kanye West will keep making music for as long as he can find the money. He will remain in the spotlight for as long as pop culture dictates he should (about three years, typically) and then find new and bizarre ways to reclaim it once his moment has passed. Taylor Swift and Beyoncé will continue to produce female music videos. Hey, they might even produce one together! That would be neat.
The furor over Kanye West’s outburst – how dare he interrupt a highly-paid star from thanking people for an award she’s already won! – will be trivia a year from now. And the thousands of cultural artifacts that this furor has produced – West’s apology on the Jay Leno Show, the YouTube videos of people calling West a jackass, the Photoshop memes above and the inevitable Saturday Night Live spoof – won’t even elicit a chuckle by then.
Perhaps that’s the meaning of “Web 2.0” or “the new media.” It produces intricate artifacts of immediate transience – huge monuments that start dissolving into sand almost as soon as they’re finished. Instead of a careful craftsmanship that takes months or years, we can now throw togeth–
Yes, Kanye?
Yo, Perich! I’m really happy for you; I’mma let you finish. But Marshall McLuhan had one of the best theories of media of all time! One of the best theories of all time!