The eternal dissonance of the MTV Video Music Awards ostensibly celebrating a form no longer actively promoted on the brand’s flagship channel has long made the show a tricky tightrope to be walked. It’s led to a lot of confusion in category nomenclature, of course — with the nouns disappearing from categories like “best pop” and “best hip-hop,” and artists now accepting awards like “song of the summer” and “best album” that are totally divorced from the music video format. But a much bigger concern for the VMAs than what awards they should be giving out in 2025 is who they’re putting the show on for the first place: the kids who have been the lifeblood of the channel’s audience for over 40 years now, or the millennials who actually remember when music videos on MTV still moved the culture.
It’s 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 ’24 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’t feel like they overwhelmed the newer artists — the artists who would, ostensibly, keep the show relevant enough to keep it from ever turning entirely into a Those Were the Days fest.
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And that’s what made the 2025 VMAs so frustrating. Those contemporary artists were there on Sunday night (Sept. 7), and basically in full effect — superstars who’d 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.
Because 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’ve 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’re 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 — at 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 “Abracadabra” and “The Dead Dance.” (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.)
More 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 — who with her expert-level dance moves, keen sense of staging and design and obvious reverence for TRL-era megapop, was absolutely born to play the VMAs — 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’d already dominated the VMAs stage the year before, made it two-for-two with this year’s “Tears” 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.
Hopefully fans who watched MTV (or CBS, also airing the VMAs broadcast for the first time) caught all those. But they might’ve very well missed a couple in between the three lengthy, multi-song medleys — complete both with introduction and acceptance speech — delivered in the show’s first two hours.
None of them were bad, or totally unwelcome. Certainly, Mariah Carey winning the Video Vanguard award made for a nice moment — 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 — all bangers, of course, but overlapping considerably with a similar performance he gave at the VMAs just four years earlier?
On their own, any of these would’ve been fine. With three in the space of the show’s first 90 minutes, it became overbearing — and we still had a multi-song Ozzy Osbourne tribute to get to, though at least that felt obviously timely following Osbourne’s passing, and was led by Yungblud, the 28-year-old U.K. rocker whose electrifying version of Black Sabbath’s “Changes” had recently brought him to a new level of stateside exposure. Meanwhile, as the VMAs were honoring Martin’s and Busta’s legacies in Latin pop and hip-hop, respectively, they were paying those genres fairly short shrift in modern day: J Balvin, who introduced Martin’s medley, led the only other Spanish-language performance of the night, while hip-hop was otherwise consigned to Doja’s rap break on her mostly electro-pop-oriented “Jealous Type.”
And 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’s Best Friend era — which, as the show’s little-seen host LL Cool J popped up afterwards to point out, had just become the No. 1 album in the country — would do everything in its power to put that, and her, front and center. Instead, it got minimal hype in the show’s 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.
But it goes back to the question of who the Video Music Awards are currently for, especially now that they’re also airing on CBS with five-time-Grammy-host LL Cool J as master of ceremonies. If they think that kids aren’t likely to tune in for anyone but their very faves — and maybe they’ll just catch the clips on YouTube or TikTok after anyway — 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’ers before me) who are still tuning in annually don’t 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 that remind us of our VMA-watching youths. And if MTV isn’t going to put more emphasis on those new stars on the one night a year it still spotlights music, it’s going to run out of viewers of any age who have anything left to be nostalgic for before long.
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