Female artists dominated last night’s MTV Video Music Awards with a certain Taylor Swift – you might just have heard of her - taking home no less than seven awards, taking her overall career total to a whopping 30.
That surpasses Beyonce’s record of 29 and indeed Swift nabbed the most prestigious award, Video Of The Year, for a third year running for her song Fortnight. As befitting her current position of all round cultural leader, it was she who in her first acceptance speech acknowledged the anniversary of 9/11, saying: “Waking up this morning in New York on September 11th, I’ve just been thinking about what happened 23 years ago.
"Everyone who lost a loved one and everyone that we lost and that is the most important thing today. And everything that happens tonight falls behind that.”
Meanwhile Katy Perry picked up the Video Vanguard award, which is MTV’s equivalent of a lifetime’s achievement gong and performed a jaw-dropping 10 minute greatest hits medley, flying through the air on a high wire, and dancing on a large tilted platform.
It wasn’t the only notable performance. Breakout star Chappell Roan went all medieval, and performed Good Luck Babe in a suit of armour as part of an elaborate scene that included her firing an arrow into a castle which then burst into flames. Afterwards she picked up the Best New Artist prize, dedicating it “to all the drag artists who inspire me and queer and trans people that fuel pop”.
This year’s other notable newcomer Sabrina Carpenter performed a medley of her three Number Ones on a moon-shaped set, assisting by a squad of spacemen and an alien.
Then there was Megan Thee Stallion, who attempted to recreate one of the most iconic performances in VMA history: Britney Spears dancing with a live python at the 2001 awards. However, she didn’t have, er, quite the same poise as Britney, declaring “I don’t know this snake, this snake don’t know me” before screaming as someone unfurled it from around her.
It wasn’t all about the girls – Eminem picked up the prize for Best Hip Hop Video for Houdini and performed the track and Somebody Save Me with a small army of lookalikes: another nod to VMA history as he did much the same thing at the 2000 awards. Lenny Kravitz won Best Rock Video and rocked out in a three-song medley and there was a memorable collab between LL Cool J and Public Enemy who performed a short set of old skool hip hop hits to commemorate the legacy of their old label, Def Jam.
You can see the 2024 MTV VMAs on MTV and Paramount Plus at 8pm tonight (September 12)
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