Sure, there were flashes in the EDM pan, like when Justin Bieber came out on stage looking like a K-pop idol and horribly lip-synced to a minute or so of Where Are Ü Now, his collaboration with Diplo and Skrillex, and then went into his new single, What Do You Mean?, a low-key electropop number with a soft, Stolen Dance (Milky Chance)-like four-to-the-floor drum pattern. That said, Diplo and Skrillex were never mentioned at all before or after the performance, nor were they invited to perform the accompanying production live for him. Though we already saw how little the VMAs care about the producers whose names are in front of the much more famous singers earlier in the show, when Mark Ronson didn’t even speak when he and Bruno Mars accepted the award for his song Uptown Funk, it was especially disingenuous to leave Jack Ü out of everyone’s mouths when they have a much more prominent presence on the song than Bieber himself.
There were EDM tracks nominated in some of the categories, but none of them were mentioned at all throughout the two-and-a-half-hour event. Experimental electronic heavyweight Flying Lotus took home a Moonman for his song Never Catch Me with Kendrick Lamar, and Jack Ü was nominated for a couple categories, along with the Chemical Brothers and Chet Faker. FKA Twigs, debatably the best and most exciting new artist of the past two years, was nominated for two awards, including Artist to Watch, but of course lost to the more popular Fetty Wap. The Song of Summer award was the most EDM-laden category of the night, with mega smashes this year like Lean On and Hey Mama up for nomination. The award was ultimately awarded to pop-rock band 5 Seconds of Summer, though, and this category was only acknowledged during the pre-show anyways. Especially after 2014 introduced (then promptly killed) the MTV Clubland Award, which focused strictly on EDM, it was highly questionable why there was so little of it up for nomination this year, because it’s not like there haven’t been many massive smash hits this year to come from the EDM world.
It just begs the question: Why would you focus so little on a genre as omnipresent as electronic music on an awards show about the most popular, relevant music out there these days? This isn’t even a matter of personal taste. You can get pissed at the Grammys for not nominating your favorite underground, experimental post-lowercase prog-pop LP for Album of the Year all you want, but we’re talking about barely recognizing the existence of a multi-billion dollar industry, whose appearance on the pop charts only increases as we progress through the ’10s. Why invite “We Are Your Friends” star Emily Ratajkowski to co-present Artist to Watch, and give her only one or two lines to say, but dedicate a large focus on “Straight Outta Compton” when inviting Ice Cube and O’Shea Jackson Jr. to present a category?
You might think I’m reading too much into a television program whose 2015 iteration included a skit in which Miley Cyrus smokes doobies with Mike WiLL Made-It after being tucked into bed, but the complete shafting of EDM at this year’s Video Music Awards serves as a representation of just how unaccepted EDM is among all these other popular music trends. It’s no secret that there’s a stigma attached to EDM and rave culture among many people because of its much-publicized festival deaths, but as the genre grows in popularity and gets more comfortable sitting alongside Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran on heavy pop radio rotation, mainstream music culture is going to have to get used to it and start accepting it for what it is: a worldwide phenomenon. We all know that change is the pop charts’ worst nightmare, but EDM is here to stay, and maybe it’s time for these awards shows to start acting like it.
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