Emotional Kanye closes VMAs, Lady Gaga wins 8
Actress Jennifer Lopez attends a showing of the Tommy Hilfiger Spring 2011 collection at New York’s Lincoln Centre on Sunday.
Taylor Swift absolved Kanye West of last year’s onstage sin with one sombre song, and West, also in song, beat himself up once again over his misbehaviour.
The Swift-West drama took centre stage at Sunday’s MTV Video Music Awards in Los Angeles, with both superstars either addressing or dancing around the incident that won’t die. Both dramatic performances delivered on pre-show hype of a Kanye-Taylor sequel and overshadowed the evening’s other moments, including Lady Gaga’s eight-win sweep. Among her awards was video of the year for Bad Romance.
The stage for both songs was set last year, when West interrupted Swift’s acceptance speech, saying her trophy should have gone to Beyonce. The incident left Swift with hurt feelings, but West was the one who was seriously damaged, as intense backlash made him Mr Unpopularity.
While West didn’t address the trophy-gate incident directly onstage, he rapped and sang a song that mocked the boorish behaviour that has upstaged his music: “I always find something wrong; you’ve been putting up with my (expletive) for too long,” he said, before launching into the an unprintable chorus, which included the line: “Let’s have a toast to scumbags.”
While Swift is known for skewering those who have done her wrong in song, for West, she offered an olive branch with her song Innocent, written earlier this year: “Everyone of us has messed up, too ... I hope you remember today is never too late to be brand new.”
Lady Gaga was the night’s top winner, snatching trophies including best female video. She was also the most outrageously dressed — and that’s saying something, giving Katy Perry’s barely there outfit and Ke$ha’s garbage bag-dress.
Gaga accepted her video of the year award with an outfit sure to anger Peta: a dress and chapeau made of what seemed to be cuts of raw beef, including a meat purse. It was one of her three zany outfits of the evening; she arrived at the awards in a spectacular outfit by the late Alexander McQueen; A Victorian-inspired gown and a Mohawk feather headdress atop a long white wig, with monstrous stilettos that made her look as she was on stilts.
Later, she changed into a black dress so overflowing she needed help to get onstage to accept on of her trophies.
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