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Carly Rae Jepsen Out-Cutes Everyone at the Billboard Music Awards

Last night’s Billboard Music Awards, for all its blacklight Bieber sequences and Katy Perry dream trapezes, was your fairly typical 2012 music awards show: Adele won everything; LMFAO played a bunch of loud songs; Taylor Swift made that face. The show’s tributes to Whitney Houston and Adam Yauch — performed by Jordin Sparks and Cee Lo Green, respectively — were actually pretty touching, but still, it was hard not to watch the entire show and reflect longingly on last year’s straight smash of an appearance by one Beyoncé Knowles. Remember that one, with the 18,000 projected Beys? And the stomping? (It turned out to be “borrowed,” but whatever.) The point is, nothing that awesome happened at last night’s festivities; in fact, the best part of the evening, in Vulture’s opinion, was the exact awards-show opposite of Beyoncé thrashing her hair around. Carly Rae Jepsen skipped — literally — her way through “Call Me Maybe,” throwing the chorus to the crowd whenever possible; her choreography was basically “walk this way, then turn around, repeat.” But Vulture will say this for Carly Rae: She doesn’t front. She has one cute, impossibly catchy song, and she knows that all she needs is three minutes and a couple of beach balls for the audience to bat around. The rest takes care of itself. We respect that self-knowledge, especially after the dream trapezes. Anyway, here’s your hit of “Call Me Maybe” for the day. Enjoy!

Watch Carly Rae Jepsen at the Billboard Awards