Given four minutes to do whatever the heck he wanted to at last night’s MTV Video Music Awards, Kanye West took the stage with a goal, and those four minutes really ended up being around seven. It seems anything is possible.
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Amid the decline in linear TV performance, MTV is shifting attention to the show’s digital performance.
West has had even more history with the awards show: He famously jumped onstage and stole Taylor Swift’s microphone at the 2009 show and previous year gave an 11-minute speech onstage – after being introduced by Swift – and announced he was going to run for president in 2020.
In spite of their constantly bubbling semi-beef, in spite of the fact that he’s known that Taylor Swift might be a snake emoji in the grass for longer than anyone, in spite of the subliminals she threw his way at the Grammys, it looks like Kanye West is still trying to make peace with Taylor Swift. Adele, though, won’t attend the show at Madison Square Garden, her representative said. Reps for Drake and Bieber didn’t return emails asking if they would or would not attend the show.
Drake presents Rihanna with the The Video Vanguard Award during the 2016 MTV Video Music Awards at Madison Square Garden on Sunday night in New York City. The VMAs will air live on MTV at 9 p.m.
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West came away without any major wins at the awards show, losing out to Calvin Harris featuring Rihanna’s “This Is What You Came For” for Best Male Video and to Beyoncé’s “Formation” for Video of the Year. Puff Daddy, who presented the award, said Drake was stuck in traffic. All told, the 2015 show grossed just shy of 10 million viewers across all of the networks.
