VMA’s dazzle; Madonna seizes attention (again)

At first, music videos seemed like minor miracles.
With a shortage of money and an excess of whimsy, people were turning songs into visual experiences. We were amazed; we still are, sometimes.
But what we saw at Video Music Awards on Sunday (Sept. 27) went far beyond that. Numbers done live, onstage numbers felt like video epics.
That went from the first number (Madonna, shown here in a recent performance, linking with Sabrina Carpenter, Charli XCX and a swarm of props and dancers) to the last one (Gener8ion and Yung Lean re-creating their video), this popped with amazing visuals.
We’ve seen that change happen gradually on “Saturday Night Live”: At first, each music guest just stood and sang, concert-style. Then a few people — Lady Gaga, Kanye West, etc. — added visual zest. Then more did.
And now the VMA’s took that to an extreme. Each number felt like an epic.
All of that neatly fit Madonna, who’s been there from the start.
She led with 11 nominations and won seven times. Three of them were given on the telecast — for artist of the year, collaboration and dance video.
That meant three acceptance speeches, which was two more than she was capable of doing cogently. (Her stumbling efforts on the last two compared poorly with Taylor Swift’s two sharp speeches.)
During those times, Madonna said a lot. Let’s fact-check a few things.
1) “It’s been a long time since I (won) one of these.”
Definitely. Her most recent win was in 1999, the year Carpenter was born. In fact, Madonna, 68, is old enough to be the grandmother of Carpenter, 27.
2) “We’re both short,” she said, while the two stood at a mike.
Well, sort of. Madonna is listed at 5-foot-5, which puts her almost midway between Carpenter (5-foot) and Swift (5-11).
3) And then there was her account of the first VMA’s, back in 1984.
As Madonna told it, her heel broke, requiring her to improvise. She threw herself on the floor, revealing butt cheeks long before that was fashionable. Afterward, she was proud of her impromptu moves, but an assistant to her manager said her career was over.
It wasn’t, of course, but there are many versions of that night. Let’s check “I Want My MTV” (Penguin, 2011):
“We’re getting closer to the show, we’re building sets, and Madonna had no idea what she wanted to do,” said Les Garland, then MTV’s programming chief. At that point, she wanted to sing “Like a Virgin” to a full-grown white Bengal tiger. When that was nixed, she settled for a wedding-cake number, which brought opposite reactions.
From Liz Rosenberg, a record executive: “People were stunned and speechless that Madonna behaved in such a shocking fashion. People came up to me and told me her career was over before it started.”
From Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran: “She came onstage in a wedding dress and rolled around on the floor. Afterwards, everyone knew she was going to be a BIG star. There was a confidence and a charisma.”
Two years later, MTV gave her one of its first Video Vanguard awards. It also adjusted its efforts to censor videos. “MTV’s standards and practices were the same for everyone, except Madonna,” said Jeff Stein, a top video director.
The network didn’t deny that. “It if was a superstar like Madonna, obviously we wanted to premiere the video,” said Patti Galluzzi, then an MTV executive, adding: “We were desperate to get a Madonna video on the air.”
As Tom Freston, the MTV CEO for almost a decade, put it: “It was the two M’s, Madonna and MTV. She created what a modern artist could be, and how you could reinvent yourself or reinterpret yourself, with music videos.”
Or maybe there should be a third “M,” for Michael. As Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum, the “I Want My MTV” authors, put it:
“Michael Jackson was the first video artist; Madonna was the second, and she’s the one who created the idea that video could be a forum for provocation and exhibitionism ….
“Her appearance at the first Video Music Awards was the award-show equivalent of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address — the ideal against which all successors would be measured. She treated MTV as her canvas.”