The VMAs aired last night. You didn’t watch, and neither did anyone else under the age of “still has a landline.” It’s MTV’s flagship awards show for a medium, the music video, that MTV itself has largely abandoned. As best I can tell, it’s a kumbaya session where the music industry congratulates itself on music nobody listens to.
But the results deserve a look. Madonna, age 68, took home Artist of the Year and roughly seven other trophies, including Best Album, for a record that contains a single I stumbled onto on Spotify’s “New Music” playlist. Its whole creative thesis is repeating the words “love sensation” until you surrender. It’s a bad song even if you like bad music.
Let me be clear: there’s nothing wrong with getting old. It happens to the best of us. But there’s a graceful way to do it, and it does not involve a woman pushing 70 sitting on the railing of a Jeep at a World Cup halftime show, held in place by a dancer, trying to keep pace with performers a half-century younger. And when she took the stage to accept, she announced that she’d spent the last year and a half “finding herself.” Finding yourself is an early-20s project, maybe even into your 30s if you’re a late bloomer. It is not a late-60s project.
Now, I’m sympathetic to a point. She’s been famous her entire life. Two marriages ended in divorce. Who exactly was going to tell her no?
Apparently not the industry. That’s the point. This wasn’t a merit-based verdict. It was a coordinated effort to tell us this was the best art of the year, and if your eyebrows went up, well, that’s your problem.
The same week, New York Magazine put Elliot Page on the cover of its first-ever standalone men’s style issue, shirtless, in a style issue, which raises a question about the word “style.” Whatever your view on the underlying debate, the editorial strategy is the same: declare it normal, then treat your skepticism as deviance.
Hasan Piker said the quiet part out loud this week, arguing that the left is the normal side and that the right is the one obsessed with all this. Notice the move. They set the frame, then demand you defend yourself inside it.
Here’s the thing: you don’t have to. Most Americans looked at a 68-year-old’s sexpot single winning the night’s top prize and thought, that’s weird. That reaction isn’t bigotry. It’s a functioning sense of proportion.
The left’s project is to convince you that your instincts are broken. Ours should be to trust them. Hold your ground, don’t let anyone rename what you saw with your own eyes, and remember the rule of thumb: if something strikes you as weird, chances are it is.
