Global Glitter and Geopolitical Bass Drops: The 2025 VMAs as Soft-Power Cabaret
The 2025 MTV Video Music Awards—aka the VMAs, or “Diplomatic Immunity for Sequins”—were held Tuesday night in Newark, New Jersey, a city chosen, rumor has it, because the airport has a direct flight to every nation currently under U.S. sanctions. One might expect a glorified high-school talent show to have limited geopolitical relevance, yet the broadcast reached 173 countries, an audience size roughly equivalent to the global population still able to afford both electricity and a sense of irony.
From Lagos to Lima, viewers tuned in not just to see who could weaponize Auto-Tune most creatively, but to read the tea leaves of late-capitalist soft power. The red carpet—dyed a tasteful blood-orange this year—doubled as a trade corridor: K-pop trainees debuted next to Nigerian Afrobeats tycoons, while Colombian reggaetoneros negotiated streaming-rights swaps with French luxury houses. Somewhere amid the choreography, a minor Saudi prince quietly purchased the entire catalog of a Swedish EDM ghost-producer. All perfectly legal, provided no one mentions the carbon footprint of flying in 400 dancers from Seoul just so they could twerk in near-earth orbit via SpaceX’s newly branded “Zero-G Spot.”
The night’s big narrative was the coronation of Lil AI-X, the first fully synthetic pop star whose vocals are rendered in real time by a server farm in Estonia that also happens to double as NATO’s cyber-defense hub. When she/it/they won Song of the Year for “404: Tears Not Found,” the acceptance speech—delivered in 37 languages including Klingon—thanked “my human collaborators, may they rest in temporary employment.” Viewers in Brussels noted that the speech’s runtime exactly matched the EU’s new legal limit on non-contract gig work. Coincidence, surely.
Meanwhile, geopolitical tension crackled like an overproduced bass drop. When Ukrainian electro-folk duo Kalush Orchestra appeared via holo-link from a trench outside Kherson, Russian state TV cut to a re-run of ice-skating bears. The moment won the inaugural “Best Resilience in a Proxy War” Moonman—an award hastily 3-D-printed after focus groups decided “Best Messaging While Under Missile Fire” tested poorly with Gen Z. Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture live-tweeted congratulations, prompting Beijing’s censors to replace the entire ceremony with six hours of pandas eating bamboo. Soft power, meet soft serve.
Backstage, climate activists glued themselves to a champagne fountain to protest the event’s water usage, only to discover the fountain was already 70% recycled tears of disappointed influencers. Security, recruited from the same private firm that secured last year’s COP summit, politely de-adhered the protestors, then offered them NFTs of their own civil disobedience. Everyone left feeling vaguely monetized.
Yet for all its absurdity, the 2025 VMAs revealed something bordering on universal truth: in an age when nation-states outsource culture to algorithms, spectacle is the last lingua franca. When Bad Bunny performed atop a floating barge in New York Harbor—simultaneously mirrored by hologram over Havana’s Malecón—Cuban teenagers felt the same bass in their chests as kids in Kansas. The shared vibration may not end embargoes, but it does move subwoofers, which is perhaps the closest modern approximation of diplomacy.
As the credits rolled—overlaid, naturally, with a QR code linking to a micro-transactional afterparty in the metaverse—one could almost hear the planet sigh. It was the sound of eight billion people recognizing that while the world burns, we’ve at least agreed on a soundtrack. Whether that’s progress or the world’s most expensive distraction is above this correspondent’s pay grade. Still, if history remembers 2025 at all, it may note that on one glittering night in New Jersey, humanity briefly synchronized its doomscroll to 120 beats per minute. And honestly? The drop wasn’t half bad.
