Van Toffler (former president, Viacom Media Networks Music & Logo Group): I was in the truck that night, as I always have been. I was like, “What’s up with you?” And he was like, “I’m here living my best life.”
The VMAs are very different from the Grammys, but I’d never seen him in any way with a bottle of liquor, and I think he’d been well-trained by his publicist that he was going to be photographed. I remember being like, “Are you okay?” Because I knew him very well and it seemed very out of character for him to be on the carpet like that. Whitney-Gayle Benta (former vice president of talent relations, MTV News): My story starts on the red carpet, where I saw him with that bottle of Hennessy, which surprised me. Years before we had a Twitter president and social media became the reflexive go-to place to air grievances, freak out or share goat yoga videos, that 15 seconds of WTF confusion helped turn the three-year-old social media service into the world’s go-to digital watercooler - while also setting the tone for the pop star pair’s now-decade-long uneasy public relationship. In case you forgot, this was also the VMAs where Lady Gaga showed up with Kermit the Frog as her date and later exploded in a bloody, baroque, instantly iconic performance of “Paparazzi,” P!nk swung from the rafters for a balletic aerial swoon through “Sober,” and Lil Mama notched the night’s second unexpected stage crash when she wandered out to interrupt the broadcast-ending TV debut of Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’ “Empire State of Mind.” On top of all that, just four months after the death of MTV icon Michael Jackson, sister Janet Jackson was set to kick things off with her visceral tribute to her recently departed brother, following a cold-open MJ homage from Madonna - an opening act VMA producers were certain would blow the audience away, and dominate the internet by the next morning.Įven with all that firepower, though, bring up “2009 VMAs” and most people’s memory from the night will be the totally unscripted Kanye/Taylor moment that hijacked headlines before the first commercial break. As show executive producer Jesse Ignjatovic (of Den of Thieves) tells Billboard, after more than 15 years at MTV, going into the night it felt like the show had the potential to be a “seminal VMAs based on the talent and level of performances” on tap.
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