MTV Video Music Awards

The MTV Video Music Awards, first broadcast on September 14, 1984, from Radio City Music Hall in New York City, established themselves as the most reliably unpredictable night in American popular music by exploiting the medium’s appetite for spectacle over decorum. Madonna’s performance of “Like a Virgin” at the inaugural ceremony, emerging from a giant wedding cake in a wedding dress, set a precedent for the awards as a venue for provocations that transcended the music itself. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, the VMAs generated cultural incidents that circulated far beyond the music industry: Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley’s 1994 kiss, Courtney Love’s interruption of Madonna’s interview in 1995, Tupac Shakur’s final televised appearance in 1996, and Britney Spears’s 2003 kiss with Madonna that briefly eclipsed every other cultural event of that news cycle. The awards categories—Video of the Year, Best New Artist, Best Direction—were secondary to the broadcast as social event. The Moonman statuette, designed by sculptor Michael Doret and depicting an astronaut planting the MTV logo on the lunar surface, became one of the most recognized trophies in popular entertainment despite being awarded by a cable network that had substantially reduced its video programming by the time the awards achieved their greatest cultural currency.