I watched the MTV Video Music Awards this past weekend, something I haven’t done in many, many years. And now unfortunately I must discuss it. Sorry I know it’s Wednesday now; I wasn’t even going to write about this but I dashed off a note about feeling insane after watching and thought that perhaps it was worth elaborating on? Or not! Time to find out via the Substack platform, the destination for half-baked ideas and trailed-off thoughts.
On Sunday afternoon, I went over to my friend
’s house lightly hungover from the Oasis show at the Rose Bowl (immediately revealing that I am perhaps not the target audience of this awards show) with a bag of Popeyes in my hands and curiosity in my heart. Patrik is a great person to watch this and really anything with because he maintains a healthy knowledge of pop culture and also has perfect opinions. Alongside our friend Alexis Page (a gorgeous skincare Einstein also of perfect opinions, as well as a then concurrent preoccupation with the Buffalo Bills game which I found very cool) we took in all four or whatever hours (felt like a lifetime) of the show. I had so many questions…
The sort of low hanging fruit har-har online question to ask is “who are these people!” But I actually at least lightly recognized most of them; I am after all excessively online and I do ostensibly work in music (in a way). Also Jon Caramanica is out here in the streets (literally, beep beep) doing the good work of keeping his fellow 40-somethings abreast of the Sombrs of the world. (For the record, I enjoy Sombr; to me he’s kind of a yassified Cameron Winter, both musically and aesthetically).
I think what I was most surprised by was that the machinations of the monoculture are definitely still at play, but in the most tepid and like, who cares way? I often lament the loss of the monoculture but the truth is it’s still here, it’s just weakened and fractured. I guess what I’m trying to say is that by some metrics (metrics I think being the key word here) something like Katseye is a huge success: they have streaming “hits,” a big GAP commercial, and prominent placement in this awards show.
But what does it even mean to have a streaming “hit?” Not only had I never heard one single note of the song “Die With A Smile” by Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga, I was wholly unaware of its existence, and it’s apparently one of the biggest songs of the year? It has nearly 3 billion streams on Spotify and spent 54 weeks at #1 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart, beating out “Shallow” for Gaga’s longest reigning song on that chart. Anyway one might make the argument that Katseye is not for me, a 43 year old woman (though I might argue back that when monoculture works, awareness spreads far past the target demo) but I am certainly if nothing else, a contemporary adult. Also who watches commercials? People online saw clips of the Katseye GAP ad and it got press, but did it get broad spectrum eyeballs? These are genuine, earnest questions! I don’t know the answers.
Additionally, many of the people I saw on the carpet were recognizable but completely devoid of the charisma and star power you would expect to see at an event like this. Watching the MTV hosts (also extreme “whomst” hours) interact with these “stars” was like watching two aliens perform humanness. What happened to us? Can we ever get back here:
I have many more unanswered questions (Why LL Cool J as host? What is an “MTV Push Artist”? Did they actually give out awards and I missed it? ) but this is already getting long and it’s impossible not to sound like hey grandma let’s get you to bed b/w old man yelling at the clouds. I am sure I have made zero points! That’s showbiz baby. I’ll wrap it up by saying I actually like Alex Warren (sue me!). I think his music is pleasurable and I am here for anything that bolsters my theory that we as a culture are crawling on our hands and knees back to god (he is Catholic and says his music is “inspired by worship music” but it just…is worship music). Did he come from the TikTok Hype House? Yes! So did Addison Rae. Maybe they should be put in charge of the monoculture. Okay goodbye!
Back Friday xx
"I often lament the loss of the monoculture but the truth is it’s still here, it’s just weakened and fractured.", this is me complaining to my sister on a Sunday car ride reflecting on the Oasis show and what happened to us. I gave example of Turnstile as "fractured monoculture", hardcore is not my music but boy do they have a baby monoculture of their own
the monoculture will probably always present itself as such as long as there are mass media. i think it’s just take what you can, bring it to your community and leave the rest. thank you for these thots