Unlike the other major awards shows, the MTV Video Music Awards have little concern for the history of its industry. The VMAs live completely in the moment — no token statuettes granted to veterans who bothered to do some kind in the past year, no montages of tributes to fallen pop stars, no brooding on the past in any way. Will Smith may be one of the biggest media stars in the world, including a long and extremely successful recording career, but the only reason you saw so much of him during this year's broadcast was because of his buzz-generating offspring seated next to him.

The network's institutional lack of attention span is how Justin Timberlake could earn a Video Vanguard award for a solo career that consists of three albums, and really more like two and a half if we're going to be honest about The 20/20 Experience. Still, the medley of hits he performed went on for what felt like ages, and not in a bad way — the dude's catalog is wall to wall jams. In the briefest of nods to the existence of pop culture before ten years ago (Bruno Mars's retrocentric wardrobe aside), he briefly brought out his former boy-bandmates for a brief 'N Sync reunion before he peaced the F out on them and they literally sank down into the floor of the stage like doomed souls returning to the underworld.

The night's other big, medley-based blockbuster event was Miley Cyrus, Robin Thicke, 2 Chainz, and Kendrick Lamar trading verses of their current hits. The visuals for Miley's segment of the performance were based on the controversial video for her latest single "We Can't Stop," with oversized teddy bears and callipygous black women festooning the stage, while the visibly wired singer twerked and stuck her tongue out in a face-contorting way that may have been intended as a parody of SNL star Vanessa Bayer's impersonation of her, or just proof that her appropriations extend past hip-hop culture to include Gene Simmons. Robin Thicke wore a Beetlejuice suit and dry-humped her. 2 Chainz remarkably had the least outrageous stage setup of the night. Kendrick Lamar made it all the way through his bit without declaring himself the King of Brooklyn, where the show was being filmed.

Miley's "We Can't Stop" video was frozen out of all of the major awards, despite the fact that it set a new record for a music clip accumulating 100 million views on YouTube. Perhaps it was MTV's way of sneak-dissing the platform that put the final nail in its identity as a place to watch music videos. Daft Punk's inescapable "Get Lucky" also lost in all categories it was nominated in, which may have been the most shocking aspect of the night.

The show was otherwise shock-free. Macklemore winning Best Hip-Hop Video set rap fans across the Internet howling, but given his omnipresence over the past twelve months it wasn't unexpected. (His speech after winning Best Social Message for "Same Love" set the bar for self-congratulatory behavior for the night.) A$AP Rocky managed to ruffle some feathers by using a PSA-ish moment on stage with Jason Collins where he was supposed to speak about gay rights to instead plug A$AP Ferg's new album Trap Lord, but the moment's scandalousness had less Twitter impact than the sight of a plump Joey Fatone doing choreographed dance moves.

The VMAs were bookended this year by performances from Lady Gaga and Katy Perry, arguably the two biggest current female pop stars, both of whom have new albums dropping, which gave the whole massive production the feel of a very personal duel between the two divas. Gaga had the advantage of opening the show with her new single "Applause" — which you could also hear throughout the night in a new Kia commercial on heavy rotation — and choreography that incorporated five distinct costume changes in real time. (She eventually settled on a seashell bikini and thoroughly unkempt wig, which she kept on for the rest of the evening.)

Perry, on the other hand, was blessed by the show's producers with a slow, dramatic build-up to her show-closing performance. Early on in the evening she was shown walking into the trailer of a gold-painted big rig that was shown throughout the broadcast cruising through the streets of Brooklyn. When it finally arrived at the Brooklyn Bridge, Perry appeared on an outdoor stage made up to look like a boxing ring, wearing glammed-up boxing gear. It took a fraction of a second to figure out that she was more or less reenacting Christina Aguilera's "Dirrty" video. It was an obvious bite, but then again "Dirrty" came out all the way back in 2002. In the world of the VMAs that's ancient history.

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