Mike Coppola/Getty Images for MTV
Katy Perry performs during the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards in Empire-Fulton Ferry Park on Sunday.
We experience things in reactions now, rather than head on. As has become the norm, the best way to engage with the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards, which aired on MTV Sunday night from the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, was to follow along with the slanderous jokes and instantly-available GIFs of memorable moments on Twitter.
Inside the arena, too, it seemed as if not paying direct attention was the norm, if the cutaway shots during the show of the famous and bored were any indication – One Direction studiously mute during the brief ‘NSync reunion, Drake averting his eyes as Miley Cyrus twerked, Rihanna barely moving her head for anyone.
To be fair to the celebrities trapped inside the Barclays Center, though, there wasn’t much to look at during the VMAs this year, and even less reason to look at it. An award show celebrating music videos that are almost never aired on MTV, it is the final thread connecting the MTV of Snooki and “Teen Mom” to its roots – this was the 30th annual installment of the extravaganza. At this point, it serves largely as an implicit rejoinder to the Grammys, a place where the kids can play safely without fear of Adele stealing their lunch money and Moonman statues.
Given that, it should at minimum be both disturbingly loose, and also reflective of pop’s true tidal waves. And yet both were only sometimes the case during this show, which lasted a little more than two hours, with seemingly 20 percent of that time given over to Justin Timberlake, recipient of the Video Vanguard award, and by the age curve of the room, a village elder. (He also won video of the year, for “Mirrors,” as anticlimactic a winner as this award show has ever seen.)
Mr. Timberlake was on trend in way, though: this was a banner year for clumsy white appropriation of black culture – the shambolic, trickster-esque performance by Ms. Cyrus, to whom no one has apparently said “no” for the last six months or so, which included plenty of lewdness and a molestation of Robin Thicke; the ubiquity of Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, the clumsy and intensely popular hip-hop duo, who were recipients of three awards, including best hip-hop video. They also performed “Same Love,” their gay rights anthem, with the singer Mary Lambert, though when Jennifer Hudson emerged to duet the last part of the song with Ms. Lambert, it felt like a sort of apologetic compensation for the night’s whitewash. (For good measure, Eminem announced the details of his new album in commercials sponsored by Beats By Dre.)
This year’s ceremony was also a tribute to the stubborn persistence of pop. There was the extremely brief but still exciting reunion of ‘NSync, a group plenty of artists in the crowd grew up on (to wit, Taylor Swift’s agog reaction shot). Four-fifths of Danity Kane, one of the groups made by Diddy on “Making the Band,” also announced a reunion on the red carpet.
The award for artist to watch was won by Austin Mahone, a ninth-generation Xerox of Justin Bieber. The British boy band One Direction won best song of the summer, a fourth-quarter fabrication of a category dreamed up by marketing executives. But even an award that fake shouldn’t have gone to One Direction over Daft Punk or Mr. Thicke, who was nominated for four awards for his resilient, buoyant “Blurred Lines,” and was both shut out and tasked with playing straight man to Ms. Cyrus’s wily narcissism during his performance.
The show also began and ended with the reigning women of pop. Lady Gaga opened with a frenzied, costume-change-happy rendition of “Applause” (which also appeared as the soundtrack to commercials for Kia) and Katy Perry closed the night energetically performing “Roar” in a boxing ring erected at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge.
Ms. Perry’s performance especially stood out, as did Ms. Cyrus’s, though for opposite reasons. There was also a pair of strong hip-hop performances by Kanye West, who emoted largely in silhouette, and Drake, who both sang and rapped.
For every standout artistic moment, though, there was a questionable logistical one. At various points, the show was bedeviled by slipshod editing, selective bleeping of offensive language, and intermittent problems with lighting and, especially during Mr. Timberlake’s career-spanning medley, sound.
Bruno Mars’s performance didn’t suffer from any of these mishaps – it was purposely unflashy, much like the man himself, and it was also one of the best. On a show that had little use for it, it was a solid artistic statement – and no one seemed to notice.