MTV Strikes A Chord With Gen Z

Leading Edge

MTV
 

 

- Jonathan Ringen

If you want to understand how MTV sees its audience in 2017, you could do worse than YouTubing some highlights from August’s iteration of the network’s flagship broadcast, MTV Video Music Awards. Although the show nodded to the network’s most news-making moment of the past decade—Kanye West interrupting Taylor Swift at the 2009 awards—by debuting Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do” video (the latest reverberation in the stars’ feud), the rest of the live broadcast was drama free.

The categories, to begin with, eschewed gender—just as the MTV Movie & TV Awards had three months earlier—so that Ed Sheeran and Bruno Mars competed on level ground with Lorde and Ariana Grande for Artist of the Year (Sheeran won). The Moonman statuette itself, an homage to the iconic flag-planting astronaut logo from the network’s early days, was rebranded as the Moon Person. Performances from Kendrick Lamar, Logic, and Alessia Cara all had a distinctly empowering slant, addressing black identity, suicide prevention, and body image, respectively. Artists with seemingly divergent fan bases— such as Sheeran and the rapper Lil Uzi Vert—came together onstage. And Pink gave a moving speech about resisting gender conformity, recalling how she comforted her daughter, who had been teased for looking like a boy, with images of androgynous rock stars.