My Review of "MTV VMAs 2020"

MTV VMAs 2020 tried to emulate their previous year's successes but it's a little tough when everyone is in quarantine. Or so they seem to be in quarantine. We all know in the back of our heads that there are a large number of these celebrities that aren't practicing proper social distancing and whatnot but they have to appear in public that they are.

So this is MTV's attempt at having their annual VMAs for 2020. They had to make a large number of adjustments to accommodate the look and feel of a quarantined production but you still see a ton of the celebrities congregating and socializing in large groups in the back. Yes they're preparing for their show but the viewers aren't stupid.

They had to depend a lot of the performances of their guest stars in this show. They had DaBaby and Jabbawockeez perform close to the beginning and it looked like a highly edited show that didn't fully utilize a lot of what they had. I would say that it was one of Jabbawockeez weaker choreography sets. It did use a lot of special effects throughout the show making it seem somewhat really fake for a "live" performance.

You can tell a lot of the performances heavily relied on green screen to throw some interesting graphics and effects to add more pizzazz to the performance. Miley Cyrus had good performance albeit predictable with a lot of back arches and seductive crawls on the ground. I guess we kind of expected that from her because her videos were practically the same. Is this choreography? I don't know, this is a new age of music and popular culture now.

What I do have to say is that I'm kind of conflicted with the progression of the music culture we have today. I love the fact that they had a bigger emphasis on Latin music. The conflict is that I'm not sure if people are even interested in the lyrics of these Latin songs. They listen to the beat and they like it. Music is sometimes more than just the beat it's the lyrics and message as well. At least that's how I used to look at pop music. It made me start to question whether lyrics are even important to today's music listeners. Still years ago this wouldn't even be a conversation. Latin music was largely ignored and now they have their own category which is amazing.

Another huge change is that they now have a KPop category. I have never in my life heard of Asians in North American music. Let alone singing in their native language. This was absolutely absurd to me because I grew up Chinese in the 80's. I was just thinking while watching BTS on stage, "What would life be like if this was popular in the 80's?" My life would have totally changed. 40 years and we've changed a lot! I felt like there was a huge change in the industry when they performed. I thought it was really weird that they were wearing office suits but regardless it was pretty damn cool.

I don't know how this even happened. I wonder if it's because all of the actual popular artists wouldn't come to perform so it was a last resort and they were desperate for acts to show up for their show. Even so I felt like this was a huge thing for Latin and KPop music.

One of the huge winners throughout the show was Lady Gaga. It really was Lady Gaga's show. She had a new outfit for every time show showed up on stage. You can tell that she planned out a lot of this and did a lot of work for this show. I have to commend her to because That is a lot to do and she really took control.

Oddly enough she has this song with Ariana Grande that won big at the award show. Ariana was actually there at the VMAs to perform with Lady Gaga but she wasn't there to accept her awards for her music video with Justin Beiber or with Lady Gaga. She only showed up for that short performance and that was it. I thought that was really weird. Even in that performance you can tell Lady Gaga had taken over the show. The energy wasn't there.

All to say it was a rather interesting show. I thought that it kind of resembled a high budget talent show. There were really pretty people there and some really high end production shows. I really liked what they did with the Weekend's performance with the helicopters and everything because it was memorable and grandiose. However there were also moments that seemed really low grade. These are celebrities and you know there's a lot of money in the industry but yet people were doing videos via webcam at 720p looking like an early 2000's YouTube video. The contrast of these two productions was really jarring at times.

One of the huge impacts on me was the memoriam that they had for the fallen stars of this year. I forgot some of the big stars that have passed away this year. There's just been so many and it just shows how horrible this year has been for the industry. We're not even done yet so it makes me fear for what's to come.

Overall, I enjoyed my time watching the VMA's this year. It's a much needed break from all the craziness that we've been experiencing this year. They did what they could with what they had and thank goodness for Lady Gaga for really raising the stakes for the show. If it wasn't for Lady Gaga I'm not sure what kind of show this would have been. I have to give this show a 7.5 out of 10. It was a great show but not too much to write about.