Set Your TIVOs for This Porthole into Youth Culture

Every year I encourage parents and youth workers to pay attention to three television events: The MTV Movie Awards, the Teen Choice Awards, and the MTV Video Music Awards (the VMAs). Next Sunday, September 13th is the MTV VMAs.

MTV’s VMAs always provide a revealing look not only to what bands and artists our kids are listening to, but also a peek into the type of content the top songs and videos are filled with. Every year I write an article the day after the event providing my take on the show (see my last year’s two cents here).

This year kids are already logging onto MTV.com to cast their votes (you can see what else kids are finding on MTV.com here, I blogged about that last week). Today as I jumped on MTV.com, it asked me to cast my vote for the best new artist. We can actually gain insight from merely peeking at just a few of the nominees.

One of the choices was a dark song from the band 3OH!3 titled “Don’t Trust Me.” This catchy song hit the Top 10 of Billboard’s HOT 100 at the beginning of the summer and has been hanging in the charts since. You can watch the video right on MTV’s Best New Artist nominee page, or, for a peek at the unedited lyrics, look here.

Another “New Artist” kids can vote for is Drake with his video for Best I Ever Had. I blogged about this song and video a couple weeks ago.. a song with a chorus that simply repeats, “You’re the f***ing best…” I find it literally amazing that this song is popular (currently on the Top 10 of Billboard’s Hot 100).

That is just a glimpse of the kind of content our kids are being inundated with.

Learn more by watching the show yourself on September 13th (just put the kids to bed first). Or, if you can’t stomach it, wait until the next day and you can catch my synopsis on our YOUTH CULTURE WINDOW page (yep, I’ll do the dirty work for ya!).