The fraught legacy of the 2009 VMAs, explained.

Kanye West promises he’ll let Taylor Swift finish at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards. Getty Images

Constance Grady is a senior correspondent on the Culture team for Vox, where since 2016 she has covered books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater.

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.

when Kanye took that VMA from Taylor I was like “oh, weird” not “this will psychologically cripple both artists, driving them to madness”

— caitlin bitzegaio (@caitorade) August 27, 2017

Here’s exactly what went down at the 2009 VMAs

Kanye West walks the red carpet for the 2009 VMAs, bottle of Hennessy in hand. Getty Images

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 Swift steps out of a Cinderella-style coach on the 2009 VMAs red carpet. Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic

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.

Kanye disagreed.

MTV has removed the official footage of what ensued from the internet, so most of the videos available online are low-quality bootlegs that people made by aiming cameras at their living room TV screens. But here’s what happened.

Taylor took the stage in her silver Cinderella gown to accept her award from Shakira. “Thank you so much!” she said. “I always dreamed about what it would be like to maybe win one of these someday, but I never thought it actually would have happened. I sing country music. So thank you so much for giving me the chance to win a VMA Award! I —”

That’s when Kanye sprang up from his front-row seat, rushed the stage, and took the microphone out of Taylor’s hand.

“Yo, Taylor, I’m really happy for you, I’mma let you finish,” he said. “But Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time! One of the best videos of all time!”

The cameras cut immediately to Beyoncé, who was staring at the stage with her mouth agape in apparent horror. “Oh, Kanye,” she mouthed.

MTV via The Box

The crowd began to boo. Kanye shrugged and handed the microphone back to Taylor as he walked offstage, and Taylor took it and stood silently, lips pursed and body tense, as the audience erupted into chaos: some booing Kanye, and some standing on their seats to give Taylor a standing ovation. Then MTV cut to a prerecorded segment between Eminem and Tracy Morgan.

According to Billboard’s oral history of the incident, Kanye returned to his seat during the commercial break, and Pink came up to him and chewed him out while the rest of the audience glared at him. MTV ushered him out of the building shortly afterward. Kanye was reportedly shocked that he was asked to leave, and he was seen later that evening at the sceney gastropub Spotted Pig in New York City’s West Village.

Backstage, both Taylor and Beyoncé were crying, and producers rushed to try to comfort them. It was a time-sensitive problem, because Taylor was scheduled to perform during the next segment of the ceremony. And while the first half of her number, which sees her singing “You Belong With Me” on a New York City subway car, was prerecorded, the second half — in which she runs out of the subway to perform the final verse on the roof of a taxi — was meant to be live.

Taylor composed herself and got through her performance with dry eyes and a smile on her face, although her voice is noticeably shakier on the final verse than it is during the prerecorded segment. Backstage, a producer tactfully noted to Beyoncé that she was likely to be going onstage herself soon (producers knew ahead of time who was going to win each award, although the musicians themselves theoretically didn’t), and suggested that it might be nice for her to use the moment to hand the spotlight back to Taylor.

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