The VMAs 2015 - recap

August 31, 2015

from The Bunker

Re: Last Night VMA recap

Dear Hank,

It’s been over a year since my last correspondence, but - as you know - I’ve been busy, what with the campaign and all. (Please don’t ask me what campaign or which campaign because it really doesn’t matter, all that is important is that there is a campaign for which one can claim to be busy in.)

But I come to you on a lighter note today I am writing my review of last night’s VMA awards. This is strictly for the “not young people” crowd. In other words anyone over the age of thirty, and probably over the age of 25. 

VMA stands for “Video Music Awards.” I mention this because if you watched the show you would only know that there were awards. There was one video, and little music. So if you had been dropped into the scene from Mars, which would have been a good place to be from given the costumes, you wouldn’t have known that this was a show about videos or about music. There were some old people at the show: Britney Spears, Justin Beber, Nicki Minaj to name a few. And there were some ancient people Billy Rae Cyrus who is the father of the host Milley Cyrus. There were, of course, some cringe worthy moments where my wife and I turned and looked at each other and said. “Her dad must be so proud.” (In case you missed the point here - that was a sarcastic comment.)

There was really no surprise for me in who won the video of the year award - Taylor Swift. My guess as to why she won was that she had the only video that they showed. It was beautiful. It told a story, and she sang in the video. 

Now there probably was a reason they didn’t show more videos and or sing. First off they only had three and a half hours of prime time, and secondly no one sings anymore. The first hour was the pre-show. The kind of red carpet part of the show where people you don’t know introduce people you think maybe you’ve heard of. The main MC was the obligatory black guy you’ve never heard of. His name was SWAY. I think he’s related to the obligatory black guy who hosts the X-Games. Except SWAY doesn’t have dreads. He has what I would call the semi-nappy head look. As opposed to Weeknd (pronounced “Week End”) who has the full nappy head mullet look going but more about him later.

So SWAY was with Kelley Osbourne who wore a long black dress and had half here head shaved to reveal a tattoo above her left ear that had either small letters or numbers that kept reminding me of the Holocaust tattoos, except they were on the arms. (I know you can’t compare anything to the Holocaust and I’m not; it’s just that I couldn’t get the similarity out of my mind.) There was a third host that I thought was an un-named Kardashian. I guess she wasn’t because they never flashed her name up on the screen. SWAY and Kelley got that billing, as did their various guests, most of whom were the casts of various upcoming shows. Neither the shows nor the cast members were known to me. There was one show that I remembered called “Awkward”, which - as the name implies - probably is.

Walk the Moon opened the pre-show by singing one of their two hits. I asked my wife if she thought I’d look good in the lead singer’s hairdo, a teased white guy’s attempt at a nappy head combed into a mullet roll, shaved on the sides with pink raspberry coloring on the left side of the mullet. She didn’t think I could pull it off.

I gotta give W-M (that’s the way the drum kit showed their name - stacked vertically, which I initially tried to guess was WHAM.) credit. they showed up with their instruments, which they played and the lead singer sang. He sang in such a way that you could understand the words - mostly. He wasn’t drowned out by the instruments or other sounds, and he and the band members were energetic and he, the lead singer, actually smiled, like he was having fun. I mention this because this turned out to be a departure from most of the rest of the entertainment for the night.

When SWAY, Kelley, and pseudo-Kardashian weren’t MCing the show there were a bevy of young women (five? seven?) who were standing in a curved line smiling at the camera or one another and were exchanging comments about each other, or the act that just played or was coming up, or someone they were interviewing. Words like awesome, cute, and huge were used a lot. Everyone was in one or two of those two categories. They spent a lot of time smiling and showing you they were having a terrific time. They interviewed Devi Levatano, whose dress they loved (another term that was used a lot.) Devi went on to have her picture taken at the red carpet staging area, which wasn’t a red carpet, but did have a backdrop of a mishmash of MTV icons and old symbols. That was the most clothing old Dev wore that night, for her performance she was in a hot pants and suspenders showing off a lot of skin under a transparent top. 

Come to think of it there was a lot of skin. Plunging necklines, suspenders covering up just the right spots, slits up the sides with black panels in front. Lots of skin, little of it titillating or sexy, but lots of skin. Miley led the parade in that department, When she wasn’t revealing parts of her body she was covering them up in bizarre ways. Large eyes over the breasts, or circles (also used as a patch on one eye), 

Taylor had another video, which they only showed a few seconds of that features a bevy of women that looked a lot like her, They were beautiful and very sexy. I would have liked to see more of that. One of the women was Margarite Haggerty (Jayne Mansfield’s daughter that stars on C.S.I.) She was in the background of the group of women but she was there.

As to the performances Nicky Minaj opened things up and the first thing I saw were the guy dancers’ hair. It looked like Alphapha had gone to rubber spiral school. The hair pieces were a bunch of ten inch long tightly spiraled rubber springs atop their heads. It caught your eye, that’s for sure. Nickie was atop a small pyramid like structure. She was wearing a giant red featured cap that extended three and a half feet above her head, very ancient Egyptian looking helmet. She was dressed in red, surrounded by dancers in black body paint with gold glitter raccoon like eyes. I guess they were supposed to be her nubian slaves. The Alphalpha dancers on the stage below were in matching fire engine red. She did her song, which was her typically type song, a mixture of music and rap, mostly rap, none of which I understood. The dance was comprised of her opening and closing her legs at the knees while seated and then standing with her dancers and slapping near her crotch on her thighs, alternately with her hands. A move her dancers mimicked. All the while being in what we in karate would have called The Horse Stance. I guess it made a statement. 

Then Taylor Swift joined her and they finished Nicky’s song and sang one of Taylor’s. All this was to show that the Twitter feud between them was over or never was. In case you missed the Twitter feud let me recap it for you here. (Nicky twited something. Taylor replied “Why are you saying this? All I’ve done is support you.”, Nicky “I wasn’t talking about you.”) 

Then Nicky “Threw some shade” ( a term Shelby learned from following the goings on on Twitter.) This means Nicky looked game faced at someone, which I think was Miley and said something that was not positive and Miley played the Taylor part of “Why are you saying this all I’ve done is support you.” reply with a bit of a dig, which I don’t remember.

Oh yeah, in the pre-game show Nick Jonas sang. Apparently, everyone thinks Nick is the come back kid, so he gets to walk and sing. He’s followed by a group of women dancers in silver knee high boots, with matching silver hot pants and space helmets, aka MTv style space helmets. He walked and sang. They walked along a different path. Occasionally they ran into each other, which was an occasion for Nick to stop and them to gyrate. I have to say the young ladies had great thighs. One did seem bruised, or maybe she was covering up a tattoo. Then they had to stand at attention while Nick got plaudits from some of the MCs. All I could think was the girls must be getting really hot in those helmets. One in the back row had fogged up.

Justin Beber came out and sang and danced with his group. Most of the group were girls in black leather bras, but there were at least two guys who wore what looked like bra-shoulder pads. The kind of thing I’d expect to see at an Oakland Raiders tailgate. The Beb’s dance routine was a step to the right (okay several but I had to throw in a RHS ref) which looked either like it came from his personal trainer telling him to walk in low right angle knee bend, or else he had been watching old Monty Python John Cleese Minister of Silly Walks routines. After stepping to the right, you guessed it, they stepped to the left. At the end someone said he cried, or shed a tear, I dunno I missed it.

The Weeknd came out and sang. He’s awesome. How do I know this? Because the semi circle line of smiley girls told me so, or someone did. I gotta give him credit, He sang. I just keep looking at that nappy headed hair that’s set at a 45 degree angle to his head. It looks like an aircraft carrier riding up on his head. I’m ready for little airplanes, ala King Kong style, to come flying along and land on it. To end his song he stood inside a circle that spouted flames. This was real drama. I wondered if his hair would catch fire. If it did I wondered how quickly it would go up in flame and leave him bald and burned out. I didn’t get to find out. But Miley thought the performance was even too out there for her. Wow.

The there were the rap acts. Lots of them. Iggy (Azalea not Pop) got in on it and some guys that I thought were Run DMC but weren’t. And my favorite was the white guy and the black guy with the drummer. The white guy was wearing a knit red hat that seemed to be a series of cylindrical forms one atop the other, like the old Devo hats. He also sported a sheer panty like material in a smokey shade that was around his neck and pulled up behind his ears to the back of his head where it disappeared under his red multi-cylindrical ski hat. It made him look like he hadn’t washed anything but his face his whole life. The black guy was wearing torn jeans and jacket that looked like they were either rejects or the latest style from Abercrombie and Fitch. The drummer was white sporting huge smears of red around his eyes.

The act was a typical rap act. The two guys trading lines in a kind of iambic pentameter and then they’d both come in on the one line chorus. The drummer would randomly hit the cymbals and the skins for no apparent reason and with no real beat.

To me most rap is like what these guys did:

Guy 1: de dah, de dah, de dah dah dah!

Guy 2: de dah, de dah, de dah dah dah!

Both  : Dah de dah Dah!

And repeat, 

and repeat.

etc.

Finally stop.

there last line mentioned “the VMAs.”

In between acts Miley came out in one bizarre creation after another. She had a few pre-recorded bits that were supposed to be funny. One with Andy Samborg, and one with Snoog Dog. 

When they broke to commercial they showed one of three bits from previous VMAs: Miley twerking, Madonnas kissing, and someone fondling Nicky’s boob (or someone’s boob.)

The show ended with Miley getting ready for her big final number and being half dressed back stage (or rather she didn’t want to reveal her costume yet.) and she needed to thank the last act or introduce the commercial and apparently they forgot about the logistics and didn’t give her a mic as she hid behind a curtain and announced whatever she was going to announce.

Her final act included a group of women of all shapes and sizes, or maybe they were drag queens, or a combination of the two. There were some musicians on stage, three, dressed up in cosplay doggie costumes. All these bizarrely dressed people, came out in what I’d called European clown like costumes. the biggest feature of several of them was a giant cone in the center of the breast area. Maybe, it was supposed to be a mono-breast, maybe it was just a traffic cone they picked up. Miley stood at the end of the center ramp with her legs spread while one of the doggie musicians put a long tube between her legs near her crotch and fired a puff of smoke from it. That was done several times as the climax to the show.

There were numerous awards to people we had never heard of, barely heard of, and like that there. The new thing is to shorten your name by taking out vowels. There was an award that folks were voting on that had started with five people and was by the time of the awards down to two. You could vote for Fwat Whap or Vic Monrow, or something like that. Fwat looked like he had lost his left eye to a bb gun a long time ago, while Vic looked pretty normal. Naturally, Fwat took it going away 71% to 29%. He wasn’t there to accept the award because he was touring in Europe.

Thee smiley group of girls also talked about some acts that were blowing up and gonna be HUGE. One of which I had read about in Rolling Stone. F.W.Twig or something like that. She’s dating Robert Patterson, the guy who started in those Twilight Series Vampire/Werewolf movies with the girl who can’t act Kristen Stewart. Yeah, so Twig, as I remember from her RS article likes to record in the studio, doesn’t like to publicly perform, but is dark and gonna be Huge. Okay then.

A special tribute was given to Kanye West, who was there with his wife Kim (and Kim’s mom was shown briefly in a group pic. and one of the other daughters teamed up to announce an award.) Kanye accepted his award in his POW camp pajamas and then was given free reign to ramble on incoherently about award shows (he doesn’t like them; doesn’t understand them), his regret over what he did to embarrass Taylor a few years ago (although it gets lots of air play), and that he doesn’t think it’s fair that people that work so hard get shafted when someone else wins. It was even more embarrassing than what he did to Taylor. I gotta hand it to him; I didn’t think he could top his previous “statement.” but he did.

The guy who designed the award was there. He was wearing a multi colored very wide vertical striped jacket that reminded me of the old TV gone off the air symbol they used to put on. Right after they showed him at the pre-show and Miley came out in her second of many costumes (her first being a suspendered mini-hot pants number that had wide suspenders strategically covering her aureolas) which featured a multi colored sleeved boa that looked like it was taken from a Ricky Ricardo or Martin fruit headed lady. She would have made the perfect other half of the couple to Mr. vertical wide stripe jacket guy. Oh well.

One of the high lights for me was when Taylor Swift and her group of beautiful women joined SWAY and Kelly at the pre-game show where they gave her an award. She was stunned and awed in that lovely Swiftian way we’ve come to expect. She couldn’t believe she had gotten the award, and she was exceedingly grateful. She then paused and asked exactly what the award was for. Apparently, she missed that little nugget of information.

All in all it was three and a half hours spent.

That is all, Carry on, As you were,

Bryce

Corrections and addenda:

It’s Demi not Devi

It’s “The Weeknd” not “Weeknd”

I don’t know how Nicky or Miley spell their names.

Forgotten fact #1: Rebel Wilson awarded Nicky Minaj an award. Nicky is said to have a big butt. Rebel played the fat girl in the Pitch Perfect movies and is a very funny lady. Nicky is reputed to have a big butt. She can’t compare to Wilson. Well, hers sticks out (back?) further, but in the width department - no contest.

Forgotten fact #2: At the end of Kayne’s speech (rambling?) he threw in an “oh yeah” type comment. He announced he’s running for President in 2020. He didn’t say of what, so we are left to assume of the U. S. of A. I hope he runs as a Republican because by 2020 they’ll need a new infusion of crazy.