My mom texted me about it. Dads at school drop-off asked about it. And I had the same question after watching one of my favorite performances at Sunday’s VMAs: Who exactly are Gener8ion and Yung Lean?
The pair performed “Storm II,” bringing the climactic dance sequence from their viral, two-part “Storm” video to the stage. But they didn’t begin with the dancing. Yung Lean started backstage, smashed a chair, grabbed a Moon Person trophy and carried it onstage only to smash that too. Then came the part I haven’t stopped thinking about: Yung Lean surrounded by dancers in matching school uniforms, the group moving around him in a tightly choreographed sequence. The choreography has also inspired some playful takes online, including this attempt to recreate it.
The performance also sent some of us straight to our phones. I went into the VMAswithout knowing much about these artists. Their appearance was a live recreation of a music video that had already captivated people online.
So, for everyone else who left the show wanting to know more, here’s where to start.
Who is Gener8ion?
Despite the name, Gener8ion isn’t the group of uniformed dancers you saw onstage. It’s a music and visual project created by French electronic producer Surkin, also known as Benoît Heitz, and filmmaker Romain Gavras. Surkin makes the music; Gavras helps build the cinematic world around it. Their collaborations predate “Storm,” but that video brought their work to a much wider audience this year.
If Gavras’s name sounds familiar, he directed M.I.A.’s “Bad Girls” and Justice’s “Stress,” among other visually ambitious music videos. Choreographer Damien Jalet created the movement that makes “Storm” so hard to look away from.
And who is Yung Lean?
The Swedish rapper and singer was new to plenty of VMA viewers, but he’s hardly a newcomer. Born Jonatan Leandoer Håstad, he broke through online as a teenager in the early 2010s with songs including “Ginseng Strip 2002.” He and his Sad Boys collective built a devoted following through an internet-native sound and style that didn’t fit neatly into the rap mainstream. Sunday’s performance was his U.S. television debut.
That history makes the sudden “Who is this?” moment at the VMAs especially fun. For longtime fans, seeing Yung Lean on that stage was a milestone. For others, it was an introduction and an invitation to go backward through more than a decade of music.
Why did the performance look like that?
Because it was bringing the “Storm” video to life. Released back in April, the roughly seven-minute film follows Yung Lean as a disruptive figure at a bleak boys’ boarding school. It moves through two connected tracks, “Storm I” and “Storm II,” before arriving at the image the VMAs borrowed: Yung Lean standing among rows of uniformed students as they erupt into a mesmerizing dance.
The video didn’t simply supply a backdrop for a televised performance. Its staging was the performance. Gener8ion and Yung Lean took a sequence people knew from their screens and pulled it off live, with the dancers doing the work that made it so spectacular. “Storm” earned four VMA nominations, including Video of the Year, Best Direction and Best Choreography.
Surkin has said Yung Lean was a longtime friend of Gavras’s, and that they developed the collaboration through exchanges between Stockholm and Paris. He described Yung Lean’s contribution as making the music stranger and rougher, which I think fittingly describes the tension between the song’s soaring sound and the unruly character at the center of its video.
Maybe you knew all of this before Sunday. I didn’t. But I love that the VMAs could still give me a performance that sent my mom, other parents and me down the same rabbit hole.
