MTV Awards Show Is Less Shiny but Still Slick

Broadcast live on MTV on Thursday night from the Staples Center in Los Angeles, the MTV Video Music Awards are now in their 29th year, making them older than an overwhelming majority of this year's winners.
This is not a legacy awards show. Valued for its structured freespiritedness and to some degree its stylistic diversity, the VMA presentation remains the annual ceremony with the greatest potential for shock, even if in recent years it's rarely delivered on it.
That's because the stakes are lower than they've ever been. Musicians act out all year long, and seldom on MTV or any of its related properties. Still, year in and year out, big stars - if not quite the biggest - come to experience a coronation like the one their heroes had, even if it has depreciated in value.
This year the VMAs handed out just six awards in two hours. (More awards were announced online.) The members of the love triangle of Rihanna, Chris Brown and Drake all won awards: Rihanna's "We Found Love" (featuring Calvin Harris) was video of the year; Mr. Brown's "Turn Up the Music" was best male video; Drake's "HYFR" (featuring Lil Wayne) was best hip-hop video. Drake's label mate Nicki Minaj won best female video for "Starships."
The night's other awards - all two of them, best pop video and best new artist - were won by One Direction, the British boy band that would have been champion of MTV's "Total Request Live" golden age, but that now generates much of its heat online. Consensus doesn't look the way it used to.
Still, though, no award show is better equipped than the VMAs to acknowledge the success of a group like that. The VMAs carry the burden of still being the forward-looking and youth-oriented music fan's awards show, a responsibility they have inherited but aren't necessarily equipped for.
That's because MTV's legacy as a platform for breaking music has remained seemingly unshakable, despite several years of docusoaps, dramatic sitcoms about awkward teenagers and reality-star athletic competitions. No network or organization has stepped up to fill its void, even in this era, in which musicians are as present in the commercials as on the show itself: Nicki Minaj in ads for Pepsi and Adidas; Lady Gaga in those for her new perfume; Fergie and Common selling Case-Mate; the stars of "The Voice" promoting "The Voice."
That means that the show plays host to implicitly warring constituencies, as seen here: heritage pop acts like Pink, Alicia Keys and Green Day, who still need the bite of youth credibility, brush up against legitimate young stars and also against new acts that have garnered their fame in totally unconventional, non-MTV-centric (and non-TV-centric) ways.
That meant a segment in which the host, the comedian Kevin Hart, danced alongside PSY, the breakout K-pop star recently signed to an American record deal by Scooter Braun, Justin Bieber's manager. Mr. Hart emulated the loopy gallop from PSY's "Gangnam Style" video.
The power of the Internet also gave the show its one moment of true pathos in the form of Frank Ocean, the young R&B star who this summer announced that his first love had been a man. He sang "Thinking About You" in near darkness, and with spare backing, magnifying his fragile falsetto. He left the stage almost before the song was done, the only performer of the night to force people onto his terms.
Otherwise, the performances were largely slick and grandly scaled: Rihanna on "Cockiness" (with ASAP Rocky) and "We Found Love"; 2 Chainz and Lil Wayne on "Yuck" and "No Worries."
There were a handful of moments of fluency in the politics of contemporary music. The presenters Rashida Jones and Andy Samberg sent up hip-hop's recent turn to the emotional in presenting the best hip-hop video award to Drake, leader of that movement. In Drake's acceptance speech, after recalling being picked on as a child for being black and Jewish, he dedicated his win to "any kid that's ever had a long walk home by yourself," adding, at the end, "We made it, Bitch!"
The show also offered a few brief bits of crossover pop cultural relevance, like asking the United States women's gymnastics team to introduce Ms. Keys, though having the gold medalist Gabby Douglas kick off her shoes to show off a few moves during the performance felt cheap.
As host, Mr. Hart was manic and loud and sometimes laser-focused, but just as often spraying wide and loose. The DJ and producer Mr. Harris was the house DJ for the night, inside some sort of jungle gym that looked as if it were imported from the planet Krypton, or maybe just from any edition of the MTV Europe Music Awards, which have been invariably more on the edge than the home-field production for years.
The show was somehow both commercial-packed and also brutally fast, at least partly because of a stated promise that it wouldn't run over into President Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention. The result was a rush job, leaving no room for error or serendipity. (Kanye West wasn't there, so that helped.)
As if in tribute to efficiency, the night closed with the young country star Taylor Swift, who sang her new single, "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together." Three years ago Ms. Swift was a VMAs naïf who had her golden moment interrupted by a surly Mr. West.
But the VMAs are not a show that grows up with you, and Ms. Swift was a virtual eminence grise here. During Mr. Hart's opening monologue, she laughed loudly at his profanity-thick rant about the actress Kristen Stewart's affair. And her performance was brisk and saucy, involving choreographed dance moves - part of her move into poppier territory - and ending in a stage dive that was less punk than good stagecraft. Ms. Swift is a pro now, too famous really to sweat.