Being the Award Show junkie that I am, I told my wife last night:
“Wife! Let’s watch the VMAs!”
She looked at me like I had just lost my mind.
“The VMAs? But MTV doesn’t show videos.”
“That’s not the point. There are AWARDS.”
I’m strange like that. I watch the Oscars every years, and that makes sense because I like movies. Same for the Globes, though there’s a lot of television thrown in there that I pay no attention to. The Tonys? We tried to watch the Tonys this year, but after the opening number we got distracted by More Important Things and drifted away. But I was determined. We would see this thing through. This terrible, horrible thing.
Lady Gaga set the tone with her little schizophrenic drag act, coming off like a bad impersonation of Al Pacino.* Then there were all of these acts that I had no clue who they were! I mean, I listen to popular radio every now and then. Sometimes the music is catchy and bores its way into my brain, other times I can’t change the station quick enough. It gets to the point that the inconsistency just drives me to listen to the music on my phone. Every now and then I’d see a familiar face:
That Kanye Guy!
Katy Perry’s Breasts!
Brian May? The hell?
Britney!
Then a group will perform and the lyrics would be unintelligible. Some band from California was stricken with this, and the lead singer was even two-fisting microphones. But the capper on everything was the end performance by L’il Wayne. He comes out and sings the most auto-tuned song that I’ve heard in a while, then decides to massacre Black Sabbath’s Iron Man by rapping over it but with 80% of his lyrics censored. He then proceeds to grab a guitar and Rock the F Out with his band.
The feed froze. Stopped dead in it’s track and never came back. I suppose that L’il Wayne and his wholesome lyrics and masterful guitar playing were just too much for AT&T to handle. It was a blessing though. I had really lost any interest in the whole thing by that point, and it was time to get some sleep anyways. I said to my wife:
“Wife! Let us never do this again. The VMAs and music nowadays are a wretched and evil lot.”
She agreed. No more VMAs.
I’ll probably watch next year.
*Or, the person they replaced Pacino with. No, really! Watch The Godfather and Scarface in a row and try to tell me they are the same person. Just try!
