Ten years ago this fall, there came a VMAs moment that will live forever in infamy. It was the moment in which Kanye West stormed the VMAs stage as Taylor Swift attempted to accept her award for Best Video by a Female Artist and told her, “I’mma let you finish, but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time! One of the best videos of all time!”
On one level, the fact that the scandal would go on to have such legs seems absurd. It was such a petty nothing of a moment! A drunk celebrity with a history of being volatile acted out at an awards show: So what? Why was that such a big deal? Why is it so ingrained in our cultural consciousness now, 10 years later?
But the resulting fallout was explosive. What happened at the 2009 VMAs helped define Twitter as the conversation driver it is today. The story foreshadowed Kanye West’s eventual transformation into a pop culture villain, which would be realized with West’s embrace of Donald Trump and Trumpism. It set the narrative that Taylor Swift would always be a pop culture victim, for better or for worse. And the way it has influenced their two images in the decade since follows the lines of major schisms in American culture.
So as the 2019 MTV VMAs arrive, let’s take a look back at the 2009 VMAs and their long, long shadow.
Kanye West arrived on the red carpet of the 2009 VMAs clutching a bottle of Hennessy. In pictures of the red carpet on Getty Wire, you can see the level in the bottle gradually dropping as he makes his way up the carpet and drinks more and more. Kanye wasn’t performing that night, but he was nominated in multiple categories, and he was seated in the front row. According to Billboard’s oral history of the evening, he passed the bottle around to fellow celebrities as he waited for the show to start.
Taylor Swift arrived on the red carpet in a fanciful glass pumpkin-shaped Cinderella coach, wearing a glittering silver gown. She was in the process of crossing over from the country music scene to mainstream pop, and for the first time, she’d been invited to perform at the VMAs to sing “You Belong With Me.” She was also up for an award, for the “You Belong With Me” video. The coach and gown were a deliberate reference: Taylor was Cinderella, and the VMAs were the ball at which she could make her entrée into the world of pop music.
Taylor was nominated in only one category, Best Video by a Female Artist. Her big competition was Beyoncé, whose video for “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)” was one of the most acclaimed of the year. But Beyoncé was also up for the far more prestigious Video of the Year award, for which Taylor was not nominated — so when Taylor won the Best Female Video award before the ceremony had even reached its first commercial break, most people didn’t interpret her win as Taylor definitively beating Beyoncé. It was more likely that Beyoncé would get her moment later in the night.
