At the VMAs: The sweet lost tribes of the after-parties
It’s 3.30 a.m. on the 31st floor of the Sky Villa Suites at the Palms. The VMAs are over and Fall Out Boy is hosting a party that is destined to see the sunrise. Nobody is buzzing about whether Britney’s career just went down the platinum crapper downstairs nine hours ago. Everybody is too busy dancing to what DJ Ruckus and Pete Wentz are spinning on the turntables -- whether it’s new millennium club anthems like the Black Eyed Peas’ “My Humps” or -- and where in Jehovah did this trend come from? -- Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’.” Or too busy sucking dry the Belvedere Vodka-sponsored open bar. Or too busy being beautiful. And the after-parties are frothing over with beautiful people.
If you want to gauge just how perfect the VMAs are for Vegas -- and vice versa -- it’s by going to the after-parties. And Vegas being Vegas, the after-parties are littering Sin City like the squillions of abandoned girlie cards that carpet the sidewalks of the Strip. In a town built on excess, too much is only an appetizer.
Music fans around the planet are already hyper-blogging about the VMAs: Whether Britney bombed; the Tommy Lee-Kid Rock dustup; Kanye West pissing and moaning about being the quintessential runner-up; and if the show just plain sucked compared to previous years. But those are the folks with too much time on their hands. At an after-party you might be texting your wingman across the room, but you sure as shit aren’t blogging about Brit.
The A-Ps are the entertainment industry’s version of tailgating … on crack. And nobody really cares that the game is already over or who won and lost. When you’re watching a half-dozen bikini babes frolic in a Jacuzzi jutting out the side of a building several hundred feet above the traffic, well, you don’t have much else on your mind.
The other thing that strikes you when you cruise the after-parties is that they’re as inclusive as they are exclusive. Some of the parties are impossible to crash, but once you’re in, it’s just one big happy oversexed family. Race, creed, gender, sad fashion taste: it all flies several storeys under the radar. Strangers are suddenly friendly. People smile at each other. Spontaneous conversations strike up that actually have nothing to do with the next great idea for a Vegas business venture. There’s still buckets of vanity and self-absorption, but for once they’re just backseat drivers. Granted, a celebrity studded party in a suite that costs more for a night than some people’s cars might seem a strange place to find Vegas’ tender side, but you take those things where you can get them.
It’s written on neon tablets that Vegas knows how to throw parties. And it clearly knows how to launch after-parties clear through the ozone hole. Whatever the final judgment on the 2007 Video Music Awards, and regardless of whether the quality of music and the videos that sell it head north in the next 12 months or totally suck on ice, you know that the 2008 event will be party time all over again. And if MTV can get its iconic aerialed head around that fundamental point, it’ll haul the whole hyperbolic circus back to Las Vegas where we know how to get those things right.
Adrian Zupp is the Web Content Editor of LasVegasWeekly.com. Email him at [email protected]