Kelsey McKinney is a culture critic whose second favorite holiday after Thanksgiving is the MTV Video Music Awards. In this piece, she explores why the VMAs are always primed for drama.
The VMAs are so consistently jam-packed with drama that magazines create lists not of the top 10 moments, but of the dozens. If a celebrity is going to diss an ex-boyfriend, find an enemy, or create a spectacle, they’ve historically chosen the VMAs to do it. But why?
“[The VMAs have] always branded themselves to be the most ‘risqué’ awards show,” Lindsey Weber, co-host of the celebrity podcast Who Weekly, told Teen Vogue. “They’ve always set themselves against the stuffy Oscars or Emmys, and took risks to encourage this crazy behavior.”
Risqué maybe needed to be the VMAs calling card in the ‘90s and ‘00s because the awards themselves never carried much industry clout. They are voted on by fans, the award itself shaped like the MTV mascot and not as prestigious as a Grammy or an Oscar, which are selected by an elite group of industry members. That lowers the stakes for performers; the VMAs show was more of a stage in front of thousands of fans rather than a competition for professional recognition.
MTV also embraced the IDGAF culture early on. When the network premiered as a cable channel built to show music videos in 1981, conservative cable operators refused to pick up the channel. "They thought that MTV was a bunch of coked-up rock and roll fiends, and they were right in a way," Craig Marks, who wrote an oral history of MTV, told NPR. But MTV became much more than that, becoming a place that made musicians’ careers and forever changed youth culture.
