Tate McRae’s 2025 VMAs Collapse Dance Just Became Earth’s New National Anthem
Tate McRae at the 2025 VMAs: A Tiny Canadian Teaches the World to Panic in Sync
By Dave’s Locker International Desk
NEW YORK—On paper, the 2025 MTV Video Music Awards were just another late-summer pageant of sequins, corporate synergy, and the faint smell of desperation. In practice, they became the moment the planet realized it now shares a single nervous system, and Tate McRae—5’7″ on a tall day—was the electrode.
The Calgary-born singer arrived in a dress made of recycled ocean plastic that looked suspiciously like the Pacific Garbage Patch had taken up couture. When she won Best Choreography for “Nervous System,” a track whose TikTok dance involves collapsing in slow motion, the camera caught simultaneous watch-party screams from Lagos to Lahore. The sound meter at the Barclays Center briefly registered the same decibel level as a 747 takeoff; the UN later confirmed it matched seismic spikes in twelve countries. Globalization has always been a marketing term—last night it became a measurable scream.
The broader significance? Exporting Canadian anxiety turns out to be a growth industry. McRae’s lyrics—essentially internal monologues from a gifted overthinker—have become the Esperanto of post-pandemic dread. A Brazilian diplomat confided that Portuguese simply lacks a word for “I ghosted him because he used the wrong emoji”; McRae supplied the soundtrack instead. Meanwhile, the Korean Ministry of Culture has quietly added her discography to its soft-power syllabus, right next to kimchi-making videos and BTS choreography. Even the French, who traditionally dismiss any pop that isn’t Serge Gainsbourg lighting a cigarette on a grave, tweeted “c’est tellement nous” when she performed beneath a literal rain cloud rigged by an Icelandic art collective.
Backstage, the economics were delightfully dystopian. A senior Viacom executive bragged that carbon offsets for McRae’s private jet were “priced into the brand.” Translation: her guilt is now a line item. The same bean-counter noted that international streaming royalties were up 312 % year-over-year, thanks to VPN-toting teens in countries where YouTube Premium costs more than the average weekly wage. Capitalism, ever the good sport, has monetized the very act of wanting out of capitalism.
Yet the most curious subplot was geopolitical. During McRae’s medley, the feed cut to a satellite link-up: Ukrainian teenagers dancing the “collapse” in a Kyiv metro station, Iranian girls filming clandestine rooftop renditions, and—because irony has diplomatic immunity—a group of North Korean defectors in Seoul doing the choreography with surgical precision. No one planned the montage; it was crowdsourced via an open API MTV launched at 2 a.m. the night before. Somewhere in the Kremlin, a propaganda minister reportedly threw his coffee at a wall. Soft power used to require symphony orchestras and Olympic Games; now it needs twenty seconds of synchronized flailing.
Of course, the darker joke is that none of this changes the actual weather. Outside Barclays, sea-level rise had closed two subway lines; inside, a hologram of McRae performed “Nervous System” on a melting glacier set piece. The applause was thunderous, the metaphor unsubtle, and the exit strategy nonexistent. Climate scientists watching from Greenland tweeted that the glacier depicted was already gone, but the render looked “pretty accurate.” Art imitates life, then life files for Chapter 11.
In the press room, McRae—still panting from the final dance break—was asked what message she had for the world. She blinked, genuinely startled, and said, “Maybe just… hydrate?” A Brazilian journalist translated the quote as “bebam água,” and by sunrise it was trending above a cholera outbreak in three languages. Humanity, it turns out, will share apocalypse memes faster than clean water.
As confetti cannons fired biodegradable glitter that will nevertheless clog the East River for months, one truth lingered: a 21-year-old from the Canadian prairies had choreographed the planet’s communal panic attack. The VMAs ended, but the feed keeps looping—Tokyo breakfast shows, Istanbul nightclubs, a Nairobi matatu blasting the track on eight-bit speakers. Somewhere, a data center in rural Oregon is humming, keeping us all in sync, burning coal so we can collapse on cue.
And that, dear readers, is what we now call international cooperation. Tate McReaucracy, anyone?
