(From The Hartford Courant -- By Roger Catlin)
Is there any question that Sunday's 2005 MTV VIDEO MUSIC AWARDS (VMA) was by far THE WORST EVER?
[Whew, I thought so too. But I also thought I was getting old.]
The dud who calls himself DIDDY had no monologue and didn't even introduce half of the presenters. But he made sure you knew he really was giving away a watch to an audience member by doing it twice. And he apparently had a hand in making an awards show where ROCK was patronized the way HIP-HOP once was.
He reached into is usual career-saving bag by resurrecting THE NOTORIOUS B.I.G. one more time for an overblown production number. He kept promising surprises, saying "anything can happen." And it was surprising, I guess, that nothing actually did.
[DIDDY had said during the VMAs and in pre-interviews that if a woman wanted to walk naked across the stage, that was "cool" cause "anything could happen." I was at least half-expecting something outragious like that. Nada. Nothing.]
You couldn't hide the looks of boredom or contempt of entertainers forced to sit through the debacle. Who could defend R. KELLY's stupefying lip-synching of his tuneless, incomprehensibly bad soap-opera narrative?
50 CENT wasn't much better, muttering along to his own recording in his performance. And M.C. HAMMER, seen for a moment, was held up as some sort of pioneer rather than the '80s blip whose easy-come, easy-go career is being satirized in TV ads.
For all the shout-outs, talk of expensive jewelry and inordinate focus on fashion (which will result in endless future FASHION DON'T COLUMNS), it seemed more divorced from reality than most award shows.
Despite the fact that the dominant winner of the event was GREEN DAY's AMERICAN IDIOT, a politically charged work, there was nary a word of politics or advocacy from young people in wartime.
It only pointed out the emptiness of a culture on A FORMER MUSIC CHANNEL that's far more focused now on the forced, unreal gloss of THE REAL WORLD and LAGUNA BEACH.
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