Eminem and Lady Gaga perform at quirky YouTube awards

Crying babies, Win Butler’s Kanye moment, a faked double suicide, face painting, a makeup-free Lady Gaga in plaid and a trucker’s cap.

There were all kinds of unexpected moments on the first YouTube Music Awards, as imagined by Spike Jonze and carried off by the odd couple hosts Jason Schwartzman and Reggie Watts.

Eminem, Taylor Swift and Macklemore & Ryan Lewis were among the winners during Sunday night’s live webcast from New York. But the awards were sort of beside the point as Jonze and others directed live videos with Eminem, Gaga, M.I.A. and rapper Earl Sweatshirt, and Schwartzman and Watts careened about the soundstage with only notecards to point the way.

Eminem was named artist of the year before performing a word-perfect version of his new lung-busting tour de force Rap God, filmed in black and white. Macklemore and Lewis won YouTube breakthrough.

The show made a clear bid for the quirky, a benefit of being streamed by YouTube rather than broadcast on television.

If the music itself sometimes felt a little overshadowed by all the hoopla, it shouldn’t surprise. The show was also a sort of announcement by YouTube of its intentions to take a bigger role in the music industry.

The music awards market is almost as crowded as the music market. YouTube featured big stars such as Lady Gaga to attract attention, while keeping enough of an outsider perspective to differentiate itself from MTV, the Grammys and other music powerhouses.

Although the Google-owned site has for years been a go-to place for music fans around the world, the site is now expected to introduce a paid music service by year-end.

Actress Gina Gerwig kicked the awards off as the protagonist of a live video of Arcade Fire’s Afterlife, directed by Jonze. Gerwig appears to break up with her boyfriend, then expresses the emotions she’s feeling in an interpretive dance that moves from apartment to forest to soundstage with a little visual trickery.

A short while later Schwartzman and Watts admitted they would be working the 90-minute show without a script – with just notecards standing between them and awkward pauses and brief technical difficulties.

“This is all about anything happening,” Schwartzman said, and it sort of did.

Arcade Fire frontman Win Butler stepped into the shot to take photos with his iPhone, the show’s hosts ran through the crowd a few times, climbed a ladder, participated in face-painting, performed not one but two improvised songs and in the show’s most awkward moment carried babies through the crowd and tried to interview Macklemore and Lewis as they cried.

“So do we get to keep the babies?” Macklemore asked.

Schwartzman said the night was about creativity, and it certainly was creative.

Earl Sweatshirt and fellow rapper Tyler, the Creator, of the Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All hip-hop collective, performed their song Sasquatch in the midst of a mosh pit, using hand-held cameras to relay the frenetic experience. Lady Gaga went the opposite way, performing her new song Dope wearing just a black cap, sunglasses and a plaid shirt. She sat alone at a piano, with the camera tight on her face. She removed the glasses to reveal tears on her face as she sang.

Avicii played the dumb hot guy part in a short film that concluded with a blood-spattered faked double suicide and Butler made a return to the stage when he jokingly interrupted as a group of Swift fans accepted her award, recreating the infamous moment when Kanye West rushed the stage during Swift’s win at the MTV Video Music Awards.

“Not Taylor Swift,” Butler said. “I’m gonna let you finish. Not Taylor Swift. The YouTube phenomenon of the year was definitely the ‘Harlem Shake.’ I don’t know. No disrespect, but everybody knows that if you’ve ever been on YouTube, so whatever.” He then dropped the mic and walked off stage.

Walk off the Earth, along with KRNFX, took the Phenomenon Award for their version of Taylor Swift’s I Knew You Were Trouble, while the Innovation Prize went to DeStorm, who won for See Me Standing.

And in an acknowledgement of the hefty amount of user-generated content that goes on YouTube – everything from yawning kittens to cellphone video of major world news – YouTube gave out something called Response of the Year.

That prize went to Lindsey Stirling and Pentatonix, for their cover of Imagine Dragons Radioactive. Stirling is a star among violinists – but does not have the star power of Katy Perry, another of the night’s nominees.

There were cultural references, including the quirky song The Fox (What Does the Fox Say?) from Norwegian duo Ylvis, a viral hit earlier this year.