The most memorable moment from Sunday night’s MTV Video Music Awards wasn’t a fight, or an interruption, or even a kiss. When we think back about the 28th annual VMAs, we’ll remember pop star Beyonce beaming onstage, rubbing her pregnant belly as if it was already an infant, while papa Jay-Z and well-behaved uncle Kanye West cheered her on from the front row of the Nokia Theater in Los Angeles.
Beyonce had roared through “Love on Top,” a standout cut from her excellent “4” album about marital fidelity and the joys of impending motherhood. She’d danced purposefully, but cautiously (one might even say parentally), looking throughout like a woman with a secret she was dying to spill. After modulating her way through five choruses, each time reaching — and hitting — higher notes, she pulled open her glittering purple blazer to reveal what she’d already half-given away on the pre-show.
The VMAs used to belong to pop’s bad boys: Eminem, Kanye, Van Halen, Aerosmith. But beginning with Rihanna’s protective “Umbrella” in 2007, a solo female performer has taken the most coveted Moon Men every year.
Top honors in 2011 went to Katy Perry’s “Firework,” a deadly earnest self-empowerment ballad that plays like the advice a well-meaning mom might give an offbeat child who’d been bullied on the schoolyard. The video matches the sentiment. Perry inspires a child with leukemia, a shy young gay man, a victim of domestic abuse, and an overweight teenager; in a clumsy but well-meaning metaphor for personal expression, sparks erupt from her chest as she sings.
Because MTV targets a younger audience than the one that tunes in for the Grammys, the Video Music Awards show reflects the state of contemporary mainstream pop better than any other single event. For the past two years, the Billboard Hot 100 has been dominated by female voices with supportive messages for young misfits. It is telling thing that the most prominent male presence at the 2011 Video Music Awards was the fictitious greaser “Joe Calderone” — the drag alter-ego of Lady Gaga, the Mother Monster herself.
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