42nd Annual MTV Music Awards (CBS-TV, Paramount, Viacom, MTV, aired September 7, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, September 7) I watched the live telecast of the 2025 MTV Video Music Awards. They didn’t announce it as the “ … Annual” but the awards show began in 1984, which would have made last night’s the 42nd (assuming the shows continued every year). It was the typical lumbering beast of a modern awards show, in which the performances by various nominated artists were more important than the rather perfunctory presentations of the actual awards. My B.S. Detector went off big-time when I heard the announcer hyping the contents of the upcoming show and say they were honoring the “genius” of rapper Busta Rhymes. I’m sorry, but I can’t stand rap and I think it’s a contradiction in terms to call any rapper a “genius.” As I’ve said before, rock ‘n’ roll evolved in its first 20 years from the simplicity of early Elvis and the Black artists he was imitating to the sophistication of works like The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, while rap has turned 50 and is still mired in the garbage from which it started. It’s all about glorifying murder, rape, Queer-bashing, drug dealing and collecting the outrageously tasteless jewelry colloquially known as “bling.” The hints of progressive social commentary in early rap (The Last Poets – the unacknowledged pioneers of the form – Grandmaster Flash and Public Enemy) have long since disappeared and been replaced by the criminal pretensions of the “gangstas.” The show opened with Doja Cat’s “Jealous Type,” a decent enough song marred by the thinness of her voice. All too many of the women divas today (though it’s nice to see how strongly women dominate the pop music scene today – seven of the 16 songs performed last night were by women artists and women dominated the awards: Ariana Grande won Video of the Year and Song of the Year, and Lady Gaga was Artist of the Year) have thin, scratchy little voices that couldn’t carry across a closet without amplification and AutoTune. I’ll never forget a previous music awards show during which three baby divas took turns singing choruses of Patti Labelle’s hit “Lady Marmalade” – and then Patti Labelle herself came out with a gesture that said, “Move over, little girls, and let the old pro show you how it’s done.”

The next singer was Lala Young, whose song was called “Messy” and which I’ve had liked a lot better if her voice weren’t afflicted with a peculiar gargling sound in its lower register. When the song took her high, she sounded fine in a neo-Janis Joplin sort of way (though Idina Menzel and especially Maren Morris have come closer to recapturing Janis’s spirit). Then came the first-ever “Latino Icon” award presented to singer Ricky Martin, who sang “Livin’ La Vida Loca,” his star-making hit. If they’d just left it at that, it would have been fine – the song was one of those infectious guilty pleasures and I quite enjoyed it. But then, like all too many performers on last night’s show, that was just the start of an interminable medley that also included “Pégate,” “Baila Conmigo,” “María,” and “The Cup of Life.” Then came the modern singer Tate McRae (another woman) doing a medley of her own with “Revolving Door” and “Sports Car.” Once again I wish she’d stopped at “Revolving Door” – it was by far the better of her two songs. After that they gave the Song of the Year award to Bruno Mars (who luckily did not perform last night: his popularity continues to elude me and every time I’ve seen him he looked like he was auditioning for a biopic of Michael Jackson) and someone named Rosé for a song called “Apt.” Then the “genius” of Busta Rhymes was showcased in yet another interminable medley: I missed the first two “songs” but the titles I got (Google’s song-search app got quite a workout from me last night!) were “Gimme Some More,” “Scenario,” “Touch It,” and “Pass the Courvoisier.” Rhymes’s presentation was so maniacally hectoring, even by rap standards, that I was doing the Nazi salute and thinking, “If there were a Black Hitler, this is what he would look and sound like.” Busta Rhymes got an honorary “Rock the Bells Visionary” award, of all things.

The next song was by Sabrina Carpenter and was called “Tears.” She came out on stage with choristers enacting non-violent protesters carrying signs with slogans like “If You Hate You Won’t Get Laid” (Donald Trump would no doubt beg to differ!) and “Protect Trans Rights.” I liked the sentiments and especially liked their flagrant violation of the evening’s host, L. L. Cool J., who for me has transcended his rapper origins with a recurring role in law enforcement on NCIS Los Angeles, who’d begun the show with an order to all participants to check their politics at the stage door. What I didn’t care for so much was the extent to which her song was overproduced; it was yet another record whose potential beauty was submerged under too many instruments. After that came an odd pairing: Post Malone and Jelly Roll, shown from the stage of a concert they were giving together in Germany, doing a song called “Losers,” and then someone called the Kid LAROI (that’s how he spells his stage name; his birth name is Charles Kenneth Jeffrey Howard, which puts him just one first name short of Reginald Kenneth Dwight a.k.a. Elton John, the rock star with five first names) doing a song called “Lost.” Then Mariah Carey was presented with something called “The Vanguard Award,” and the pre-commercial announcer hyping her upcoming appearance said we’d hear her sing “anthems.” My heart sank at the plural, since that meant we were in for yet another interminable medley. The songs were “Sugar Sweet,” “Fantasy,” “Heartbreaker,” “Obsessed,” “It’s Like That,” and “We Belong Together.” There was nothing from her early years – no “Vision of Love,” “Butterfly” (my all-time favorite Mariah Carey song), or “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” My favorite Mariah Carey story is about her abrupt departure from Columbia, where she’d had her early hits, to EMI’s Virgin label in April 2001. The deal included a film project called Glitter, and both the album and the film were such total flops that when the September 11, 2001 attacks happened, Jay Leno joked, “They say that terrorists hide where no one else goes. So they should be looking for Osama bin Laden in the theatres showing Mariah Carey’s movie Glitter.”

After that the young male singer Alex Warren, who won Best New Artist, did a mini-medley of his hits “Eternity” and “Ordinary.” Calling your song “Ordinary” seemingly invites all too many “you said it, we didn’t” jokes, but it was actually pretty good if … well, ordinary. That was followed by a tribute to the late Ozzy Osbourne featuring Steven Tyler and Joe Perry from the bad Aerosmith in yet another medley, this time of Osbourne-associated songs: “Crazy Train,” “Changes,” and “Mama, I’m Coming Home.” I was never a fan of Ozzy Osbourne, either with Black Sabbath or on his own, though I bought a CD copy of his first solo album, Blizzard of Ozz, on a cheap reissue label because I’d just read the true-crime book Say You Love Satan, about a group of adolescents who formed a cult around their made-up version of Satanism and ultimately killed one of their number, and the author had mentioned that the cultists were particular fans of Osbourne’s song “Bark at the Moon.” I have a certain admiration for Osbourne, however, in that he cleaned up his extensive drug and alcohol problems in the early 2010’s and that he made it to 76. I remember the documentary The Decline of Western Civilization, Part 2: The Metal Years, in which the filmmakers shot an interview with Osbourne while he was in his kitchen pouring himself a glass of orange juice – only he was so drunk and/or stoned he missed the glass completely and poured orange juice all over the floor. Anyone who thinks of Osbourne as the avatar of heavy metal was in for a surprise last night; the third song, “Mama, I’m Coming Home,” was actually a quite good blues pastiche in which at least one of the guitars was acoustic.

The next number after the Osbourne tribute was a nod to reggaetón, the Puerto Rican genre that’s a mixture of reggae, Latin, and rap (and I find the rap parts more tolerable than usual because they’re blessedly in a language I don’t understand). The artists were J. Balvin, Justin Quiles, Lenny Tavarez, and D. J. Snake, and the songs (once again, there were two) were “Zum Zum” and “Noventa.” After Sabrina Carpenter was presented with Best Album for Short ‘n’ Sweet, the show presented modern-day country artist Megan Moroney for one of the most pleasant songs on the program, “6 Months Later.” (The numeral is part of the official title.) The next artist was a tall, slender young man named Sombr (he was born Shane Michael Boose) doing yet another medley, “Back to Friends” (as in the person whom he’s just had sex with wants to go back to being just his friend) and “12 to 12.” As with many of the two-song mini-medleys during the evening, the first song was better than the second and quite frankly he should have quit while he was ahead.

The show was closed by a blankly handsome young man named Conan Gray, dressed in a purple robe that made him look like yet another white guy who wants to be Prince, singing a song called “Vodka Cranberry.” There’s a Reddit page on the song, https://www.reddit.com/answers/cdba0f37-55a4-449a-bcc3-e15aea6e6860/?q=Meaning%20of%20Vodka%20Cranberry%20by%20Conan%20Gray&source=PDP, that hints that “Vodka Cranberry” is Gay-themed. Gray’s Wikipedia page is silent about his sexual orientation, but the actual video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yzbvv8WdP9k&list=RDYzbvv8WdP9k&start_radio=1) is clearly about two young male lovers sadly but bitterly breaking up. The video is a lot more poignant than the performance Gray gave on the Video Music Awards, which seemed (like too much of the show) to drown in its own pretensions. His VMA performance is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OWIuCp1fyg&list=RD5OWIuCp1fyg&start_radio=1 and began with a shot that reminded me of the current Purple Mattress commercial, a parody of Sleeping Beauty in which the prince wakes the sleeping princess with a kiss, but she begs off, sends him away and insists on being allowed to continue to sleep on her Purple Mattress. The figure in the Video Music Awards performance was too androgynous to be clearly identifiable as male; it looked to me like a small-breasted woman. It was an odd ending to a typically lumbering awards show in which even the potentially moving moments were drowned in too much production.