Snoop, Eminem’s NFT Act at the VMAs looked like a bad Insta filter

Forget pivoting to Jersey and re-pivoting back to Brooklyn’s Barclays Center. MTV’s Video Music Awards is hedging its bets on a new savior: NFTs. Last night, megawatt rappers Snoop Dogg and Eminem performed together on the show … as their Bored Ape Yacht Club digital avatars.

Hosted annually by MTV, the VMAs are basically the Academy Awards for music videos, although it has since branched out to award awards more generally for pop music. In the midst of a steadily declining viewership, producers have struggled in recent years to bring the show back to its former prominence. For the first time in the show’s history, this year, MTV introduced a “best metaverse” category. Nominees for the first view of the category includes:

• Blackpink, for a collaboration with PUBG mobile
• Ariana Grande, for a collaboration with Fortnite
• BTS, for a collaboration with Minecraft and YouTube

• Charli XCX, for a collaboration with Roblox
• Twenty One Pilots, for a collaboration with Roblox
• Justin Bieber, for a collaboration with the virtual concert platform Wave

Black rose ran away with the prize. That the category exists in the first place is a sign of how quickly NFTs and the metaverse have achieved cultural saturation. But the show also literally put a metaverse at its center. During last night’s show, Snoop Dogg and Eminem performed a version of their song, “From the D 2 the LBC.”

The two previously appeared as these characters in the song’s official video, released in June last year. Yesterday’s performance started with a brief sketch of the duo who really became, really loud – so loud that together they conjure up another realm of the mind. (Marijuana’s psychoactive effects have not been proven to cause hallucinations to this degree.) Here’s the video:

Outside of the NFT diehards, who have gained a reputation for uncritically praising anything in this realm, people have abused the performance for seeming low quality, even calling it in. “Shall not lie; I didn’t think an NFT show could be good,” one person so. “And I was absolutely right; this is terrible.” Others compared the effect that turned the stars into the monkeys they own to bad Instagram filters or other crappy augmented reality technology. (Author’s note: Clearly, the show is absolutely nothing on the level of Fortniteis epic Ariana Grande or Dillon Francis concerts.) “I wish we got to see more of Eminem and Snoop without the cartoon effects,” lamented one person in the YouTube comments.

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It’s not just Snoop Dogg and Eminem who are fully involved in the Bored Ape Yacht Club. The collective in particular seems to hold an irresistible allure for A-listers whose heyday ended more than a decade ago.

Hotelier heiress Paris Hilton—arguably the person most single-handedly responsible for our modern concept of fame—debuted her Bored Ape NFT on The Tonight Show this winter. (Host Jimmy Fallon is also interested in NFTs.) Rapper and producer Timbaland is a full-on partner with Bored Ape Yacht Club. And actor Seth Green became famous for having his Bored Ape stolen earlier this year. He reportedly paid the equivalent of $260,000 to get it back. NFT is now set to “star” in Green’s upcoming animated show White Horse Tavern.