<\/p>\n
\n\tThe eternal dissonance of the MTV Video Music Awards ostensibly celebrating a form no longer actively promoted on the brand\u2019s flagship channel has long made the show a tricky tightrope to be walked. It\u2019s led to a lot of confusion in category nomenclature, of course \u2014 with the nouns disappearing from categories like \u201cbest pop\u201d and \u201cbest hip-hop,\u201d and artists now accepting awards like \u201csong of the summer\u201d and \u201cbest album\u201d that are totally divorced from the music video format. But a much bigger concern for the VMAs<\/a> than what awards they should be giving out in 2025 is who they\u2019re putting the show on for the first place: the kids who have been the lifeblood of the channel\u2019s audience for over 40 years now, or the millennials who actually remember when music videos on MTV still moved the culture.<\/p>\n \n\tIt\u2019s a question whose answer the VMAs annually attempts to split the difference between, usually with some balance of veteran and new performers, mostly weighted towards the latter. A few times in recent years, birthdays had even been given something of a built-in excuse to go retro, via the 40th anniversary of both the channel (2021) and the VMAs themselves (2024), and the widely celebrated 50th anniversary of hip-hop in 2023. (LL Cool J even closed the \u201924 VMAs with a medley to celebrate the iconic Def Jam label turning 40.) Those anniversary-themed tributes and performances occasionally took a little too heavy a touch, but they felt timely enough and were generally spaced out well enough that they didn\u2019t feel like they overwhelmed the newer artists \u2014\u00a0the artists who would, ostensibly, keep the show relevant enough to keep it from ever turning entirely into a Those Were the Days fest.<\/p>\n \n\tAnd that\u2019s what made the 2025 VMAs so frustrating. Those contemporary artists were there on Sunday night (Sept. 7), and basically in full effect \u2014 superstars who\u2019d already made their share of VMA history, and rising hitmakers who already seem poised to potentially do so in the future. And yet it could be easy to lose track of them with all the stage and screen time given to legacy artists, often without a particular urgency (and certainly no over-arching anniversary peg) to their performances, and stacked within the first two hours of the broadcast. It felt like a missed opportunity to really showcase the present and future, and finally let the past take a bit of a backseat. <\/p>\n \n\tBecause the opportunity was there. What felt like a higher concentration of A-list names than in many recent years showed up to the awards; anytime you\u2019ve got Doja Cat doing robot dance breaks with keytarists on stage while Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande boogie together in the audience to start the show, you\u2019re getting off on the right foot. Taylor Swift was missing this year, and her world-swallowing presence was certainly conspicuous in its absence, but that also meant that stars like Doja, Gaga and Grande could step up to carry a little more of the veteran load for the evening \u2014\u00a0at least until Gaga had to book it for her own concert that night at Madison Square Garden, though she still waved to the VMAs from Manhattan via her jaw-dropping remote performance of \u201cAbracadabra\u201d and \u201cThe Dead Dance.\u201d (The obvious emotion Gaga and Grande displayed in their respective speeches should also be considered a win for MTV, as them putting such clear stock in the actual awards is not something to be taken for granted in 2025.)<\/p>\n \n\tMore importantly, though, this was a great chance for MTV to really put some of the rising leading lights of top 40 front and center. Tate McRae \u2014 who with her expert-level dance moves, keen sense of staging and design and obvious reverence for TRL<\/em>-era megapop, was absolutely born to play the VMAs \u2014 was an obvious contender to be a breakout performer, and she lived up to every expectation with her scintillating two-song set. Sabrina Carpenter, who\u2019d already dominated the VMAs stage the year before, made it two-for-two with this year\u2019s \u201cTears\u201d debut, ending her performance with a too-rare statement of her backup dancers holding up signs with pro-trans rights sentiments. And just below their minted-star level, newer hitmakers Sombr and Conan Gray came correct with their own cleverly presented, excitingly delivered performances that should make for important markers on their career timelines, and continue pushing their momentum in the right direction.<\/p>\n \n\tHopefully fans who watched MTV (or CBS, also airing the VMAs broadcast for the first time) caught all those. But they might\u2019ve very well missed a couple in between the three lengthy, multi-song medleys \u2014 complete both with introduction and acceptance speech \u2014 delivered in the show\u2019s first two hours. <\/p>\n \n\tNone of them were bad, or totally unwelcome. Certainly, Mariah Carey winning the Video Vanguard award made for a nice moment \u2014 particularly given her career 0-fer at the VMAs before that, which she understandably made a faux-salty joke about during her acceptance speech. But while Ricky Martin has an inarguably massive legacy and always gives a high-energy performance, did we need to have him delivering a five-song Latin Icon medley barely 20 minutes into the show? Or Busta Rhymes, accepting the Rock the Bells Visionary award with a half-dozen-song flashback of his own \u2014 all bangers, of course, but overlapping considerably with a similar performance he gave at the VMAs just four years earlier<\/a>? <\/p>\n \n\tOn their own, any of these would\u2019ve been fine. With three in the space of the show\u2019s first 90 minutes, it became overbearing \u2014 and we still had a multi-song Ozzy Osbourne tribute to get to, though at least that felt obviously timely following Osbourne\u2019s passing, and was led by Yungblud, the 28-year-old U.K. rocker whose electrifying version of Black Sabbath\u2019s \u201cChanges\u201d had recently brought him to a new level of stateside exposure. Meanwhile, as the VMAs were honoring Martin\u2019s and Busta\u2019s legacies in Latin pop and hip-hop, respectively, they were paying those genres fairly short shrift in modern day: J Balvin, who introduced Martin\u2019s medley, led the only other Spanish-language performance of the night, while hip-hop was otherwise consigned to Doja\u2019s rap break on her mostly electro-pop-oriented \u201cJealous Type.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tAnd the amount of attention given to these legacy medleys inexplicably dwarfed some of the high-profile modern pop performers. You would think that a show boasting the very first Sabrina Carpenter live performance of the Man\u2019s Best Friend<\/em> era \u2014 which, as the show\u2019s little-seen host LL Cool J popped up afterwards to point out, had just become the No. 1 album in the country \u2014 would do everything in its power to put that, and her, front and center. Instead, it got minimal hype in the show\u2019s first hour, and then started directly out of a commercial break, with no lead-in or introduction. Carpenter could and should be one of the marquee stars for the VMAs for the entire next decade, and is one of the few still-rising four-quadrant pop stars at the moment whose presence could put a big dent in the star-power void left in a Swift-less year. For MTV to give her half the screentime and attention as its second Busta Rhymes career-spanning mega-medley in five years is dumbfounding. <\/p>\n \n\tBut it goes back to the question of who the Video Music Awards are currently for, especially now that they\u2019re also airing on CBS with five-time-Grammy-host LL Cool J as master of ceremonies. If they think that kids aren\u2019t likely to tune in for anyone but their very faves \u2014 and maybe they\u2019ll just catch the clips on YouTube or TikTok after anyway \u2014 maybe it makes sense to prioritize courting that older market. But as a millennial myself, I believe that those of my generation (or even Gen X\u2019ers before me) who are still tuning in annually don\u2019t really want to see the actual artists who remind us of our VMA-watching youths: we want to see artists who can create new moments<\/em> that remind us of our VMA-watching youths. And if MTV isn\u2019t going to put more emphasis on those new stars on the one night a year it still spotlights music, it\u2019s going to run out of viewers of any age who have anything left to be nostalgic for before long.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.billboard.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The eternal dissonance of the MTV Video Music Awards ostensibly celebrating a form no longer actively promoted on the brand\u2019s flagship channel has long made the show a tricky tightrope to be walked. It\u2019s led to a lot of confusion in category nomenclature, of course \u2014 with the nouns disappearing from categories like \u201cbest pop\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2006443,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[349490],"class_list":["post-2006442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-vmas"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Great-Pop-Stars-But-Too-Many-Legacy-Medleys.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2006442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2006442"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2006442\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2006443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2006442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2006442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2006442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}