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I never thought I’d be dressed as a worm while accepting an award,” she said, accepting a collaborative award with SZA (who seemed to have her own wardrobe thing going, clutching at her bosom at the podium, possibly concerned about a malfunction). The show’s host, Doja Cat, ironically strived to provide the night’s most serious and beautiful performance and its zaniest non-musical moments. Don’t put it out.'” Addressing the video’s director, MGK added, “I haven’t talked to you since we got in a fight on-set, but it’s a great video and I’m glad we won.” “I want to thank my label for putting out when I called them the day before it was released and said, ‘I hate it. Let’s go, gay agenda!” (Billy Porter introduced Lil Nas’ performance in a similar spirit: “When I was first coming up in this industry, the people were not ready for all this Black boy joy.”) Meanwhile, Machine Gun Kelly had an amusing speech that strongly indicated that combativeness was not something he had just taken up within the last few hours. Lil Nas X, not for the first or last time in his young career, may have had the punchline of the night: “First, I want to say thank you to the gay agenda.
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For better or worse, there was no attempt at scripted comedy, so any laughs came in the acceptance speeches. Yet it was hard to deny that the show was sometimes at its best when it was at its silliest - and wish for even more of that old-school MTV humor, too. The 2021 VMAs could have used a few more nods toward the grave crises in the world that are making its target demo so anxious about their future. GLAAD put out a press release noting that Mardrequs Harris from the Southern AIDS Coalition was one of the on-stage participants in “Industry Baby,” wearing the number 433,816, “representing the universal color of awareness and support for HIV, and the number of people living with HIV in the South as of 2015.” For real.” And there was a more serious message embedded in Lil Nas X’s performance than might have been initially evident, though it required footnotes to suss it out. I want to say we need to protect our young women at all costs. Billie Eilish (a non-performer) accepted her award for the best socially conscious video for “Your Power” and, without using any phrase as cliche as “toxic masculinity,” said that writing the song about older men taking advantage of girls was “so satisfying and freeing, and also really sad. But a few quick moments of sobriety crashed the party. When Justin Bieber is the only person in a three-hour show to even allude to something that’s killed more than 600,000 Americans since the last live Video Music Awards, it’s a special that has very specific designs on being post-pandemic, whether we’re there yet or not. It was not a night for peak social consciousness. Was it a sign of how far we’ve come, or how little, that dudes fighting was piquing people’s interest Sunday night more than dudes grinding? It wouldn’t have been that many years ago that these would have been the major water-cooler-talk moments - not an untelevised, pre-show squabble between Machine Gun Kelly and presenter Conor McGregor. Lest the night feature only male homoeroticism, Normani had her own moment at the end of an otherwise fairly routine “Wild Side” routine when Teyana Taylor was wheeled out, tied up crucifix-style, and the singer nimbly mounted her. From the moment he appeared on stage dressed in pink as a drum major, it seemed inevitable that there would be at least two layers of tear-away clothing and that he and his equally buff male dancers would be in pink briefs before we knew it.
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Lil Nas X has pushed the envelope so far with his recent videos that it was hard to gage whether his performance of “Industry Baby” with Jack Harlow really counted as provocative. There were definitely some moments that recalled Spears’ soul kiss with Madonna back in the day, if they hardly register as shocking in 2021.