How the VMAs lost their spark

The Video Music Awards were once the most important moment in pop music — now that they're returning to our TVs, can a Moonman still mean something in our fractured culture?

Next week, the VMAs will be returning to our television screens, this time in a new form and fashion. The storied MTV awards show has been broadcast now for over 40 years, and, even while MTV sheds every other last remnant of its musical identity in order to becoming a dumping ground for reality TV, the VMAs have found some kind of way to beat on, boats against the current.

The ratings have been somewhat up in recent years, and, for the first time ever, the show will be broadcast on MTV’s parent network, CBS, to give it even a larger platform. Of course, both MTV and CBS are owned by Paramount Global, who has been in an uncomfortable mating dance with the Trump administration to secure approval for their merger with Skydance, a reminder of how precarious things are in the halls of media power in the year 2025. Still, someone clearly believes the Moonman still has cultural pull, even if now the main prize this year will be called — no joke — “Video of the Year, Presented by Burger King®.”

Yet, while the VMAs continues to exist, and people continue to watch it, I can’t help but notice that the show itself has never felt less relevant to the broader pop cultural conversation. Or, perhaps it’s more fair to say, it hasn’t, in recent years, come even close to the kind of relevance it once had in the 1990s and 2000s, when MTV was one of the most powerful engines of music industry magic that’s ever existed.

Part of this is just that music videos don’t matter the way they once did — as I wrote about recently, in an era in which musical artists are expected to make endless video content for Tik Tok and Instagram Live, the classic music video gets somewhat lost in the shuffle. “When a game-changing artist like Beyoncé decides to make no music videos for her Renaissance album — instead, letting fans create their own clips on TikTok and such — it signals that the art form itself is no longer what it once was back when Lady Gaga rocked a meat dress to the VMAs,” Chuck Arnold wrote in the Post.

But the other part of the equation seems to be connected to a larger monolithic decline, with a cultural backdrop in which its harder than ever to create big budget moments of value that bring all of us together at once. The film industry is struggling to get people to movie theaters. It’s nearly impossible to create water cooler television series that become must-watch TV.

Music is much the same. Taylor Swift is still able to command our attention in an almost old fashioned way, the “the last monoculture left in our stratified world,” but the wider breadth of music happens in fits and starts on small corners of the internet, with songs going viral before anyone has even heard of the artist who made them.

Then there’s the matter of money. The shift to streaming has meant a decline in revenue: albums in the TRL era sold for $15–$20, generating huge profits, while a single Spotify stream now pays only fractions of a cent. What label budget there is gets allocated toward social media campaigns and TikTok virality rather than costly music videos and elaborate album rollouts. Fan-generated content is cheaper and often more effective than traditional promo.

And so, without the financial foundation or artistic incentive to gamble on show-stopping moments, the VMAs can no longer rely on artists to spend their efforts creating the kind of cultural earthquakes that once made the show unmissable.

It wasn’t always so: think back to the good old days, when iconic moments grew like weeds on the VMAs stage, kicked off by Madonna’s infamous (and controversial) roll around the stage in 1984. There’s Britney wrapping a python around her neck for an absolute marvel of a Vegas-style show, which had even Oprah questioning the Freudian potency of. Then, when those two VMA queens decided to combine powers, the world was literally shook, creating a moment of pageantry and genius that rings through the ages — Brit and Madge coming together for an inter-generational same-sex kiss, making front page headlines around the world.

There’s Lady Gaga giving it her absolute all — ending up covered in fake blood — for a performance that would help solidify her then-burgeoning stardom. There’s Nicki Minaj playfully taunting Miley Cyrus — “Miley, what’s good?” — after some offhanded comments ticked her off. Beyonce even used the VMAs stage to announce her first pregnancy in an incredible octave-raising performance of “Love on Top.” These were cultural lightning strikes, instantly mythic, instantly everywhere, some beautiful combination of chaos and carefully-orchestrated scandal and intrigue.

Things began to sour around the time of the financial crisis, when the music industry— like so many others — started to lose its footing, and the VMAs began getting headlines for the wrong reasons. If Britney once symbolized the zenith of MTV magic, she would also come to epitomize the beginning of it’s end: In 2007, her much-hyped comeback, following her public breakdown and hospitalization, was a much-discussed disaster, with a performance that was more uncomfortable than triumphant.

Two years later, Kanye West stormed the stage during Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech, which would turn out to be pop culture’s “assassination of Archduke Ferdinand” moment, igniting a feud that would dominate headlines for years and create lasting fault lines — even prompting then-President Barack Obama to weigh in, which angered Kanye so much it that it pushed him towards embracing Trump out of retrograde resentment. Then came Miley Cyrus’ infamous twerk-heavy routine with Robin Thicke in 2013, a spectacle that generated news stories and op-eds but lacked the charm or substance of past VMA shock moments.

This hasn’t been entirely MTV’s fault. The decline of the VMAs has been part of an overall downward trend for awards shows, which, according to no less than Time Magazine, are straight up dying. The Oscars, the Emmys, the Golden Globes — they’ve all seen steep ratings declines as streaming has risen over the past decade, and, more than just numbers on a spreadsheet, their ineffable importance seems to have faded too. The culture is just too scattered and sliced up to focus its attention on something shared. “The problem isn’t just an excess of viewing options or the epochal shift away from watching programs as they air, which began back with the advent of the VCR,” Judy Berman writes in that Time piece. “Awards shows are also suffering from the political polarization of the American public, as partisanship invades sectors of society that used to be essentially neutral ground.”

The last time I can recall VMAs making a blip on the radar was in 2016 thanks to, no shocker here, Rihanna, a woman with the creativity, vision, and power to still make big things happen. Maybe we’ll get lucky this year: MTV will surely try again to find some joy, and they’ve locked in Sabrina Carpenter — a magnet for scandal in her own clever way — to perform. But I was surprised to see that much of the other programming seems to be an attempt to look backwards, towards the glory days. Ricky Martin, Busta Rhymes, and Mariah Carey are all scheduled to receive retrospective awards for their contributions to music — all deserved, maybe, but hardly a nod towards the future of fun, exciting entertainment.

I can’t help but mourn what once was: a time when MTV felt like the pulse of youth culture, a place where pop stars weren’t just performers but icons from Mount Olympus. Growing up in that era meant living for the next big spectacle, the performance that everyone would be talking about at school the next day, the controversy that felt electric rather than exhausting. The VMAs weren’t just an awards show; they were a summit, a glittering, chaotic meeting point where music collided with fashion and pure unpredictability. It was messy, outrageous, and sometimes a little ridiculous, but it felt alive in a way that the glow of our minuscule iPhone screens no longer does. I like razzle dazzle. I like when stars put on a show.

Years ago, winning her own VMA in 1997, Fiona Apple famously used her acceptance speech to decry the ecosystem of entertainment. “Everybody that’s watching this world, this world is bullshit, and you shouldn’t model your life about what you think we think is cool,” she said. “Go with yourself. Go with yourself.” Atomized as we are into our own little phones, cut off from the broader vista of monolithic pop culture, I can’t help but notice, slightly forlorn, that we seem to have heeded her call. And I miss the bullshit.

BONUS:

Below, a playlist of songs with notable performances at the VMAs, including some I wasn’t able to mention in this post (Nirvana! Prince and his exposed bootycheeks! Nicki and Taylor squashing their beef live on stage! Brandy and Monica mere moments after they were involved in a physical altercation backstage!). 

After listening, take a trip through YouTube if you haven’t seen some of them: