So, how about that music awards show you’ve only just heard of, The YouTube Music Awards, that just happened, apparently? Exactly. To cut to the chase, The Sydney Morning Herald made a quick call on the YTMAs this morning by saying the inaugural, ambitious festival whose premise is a wordy mouthful to define was deemed a “weird, unprofessional mess.” Unfortunately, despite having Jason Schwartzman rummage through a birthday cake to reveal one category’s winner, it didn’t particularly live up to its own hype. As Spike Jonze said in a New York Times interview that demystifies the premise of the awards show with appropriate foreshadowing: “We’ve been given a lot of room to make a mess.”
The YTMAs essentially worked like this: Spike Jonze directed the entire award show, including “live music videos” that were clearly intended to breed their own inexplicably viral incident à la Miley at the VMAs, but instead saw Tyler, The Creator and Earl Sweatshirt rapping from a moshpit, aka #dailylife. The show was hosted by Jason Schwartzman who started off the night by saying, “I’ve never hosted anything in my life, one Christmas party and it was terrible.”
It wasn’t all bad though; the six diverse categories were awarded winners, with the most noticeable/amazing being cult K-Pop group Girls’ Generation taking out the award for best music video <3. The artist of the year award was awarded to Eminem, trupming Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, Macklemore &
Ryan Lewis, Nicki Minaj, One Direction, PSY, Rihanna and Taylor Swift despite his album not even being released until next week. ¯_(-_-)_/¯
Who knows whether the YTMAs will go ahead again for round two next year; with less-than-desirable press clogging the event, and Youtube staffer Ms Teidt reportedly saying that the event, with inflated dollar signs of misery glittering in her eyes, “certainly is not free.”
The winners for the innaugral YouTube Music Awards are as follows:
Video of the Year: Girls’ Generation – I Got A Boy
Artists of the Year: Eminem
Breakthrough Artist: Macklemore & Ryan Lewis
Best Response Video: Lindsey Stirling and Pentatonix – Imagine Dragons’ ‘Radioactive’.
Phenomenon (song that generated the most fan videos): Taylor Swift – ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’
Innovation of the Year: DeStorm – See Me Standing’.
Watch Tiffany of Girls’ Generation accept the award for best video (shown after the jump) below.
Title image by Dimitrios Kambouris via Getty.
