MTV awards to feature cutting-edge videos

New York

AS music awards shows go, MTV's annual Video Music Awards ceremony - the VMAs - is by far the loosest, the most vibrant and the most prone to disruption. It has long been the platform where pop stars know a medium amount of misbehaviour will be tolerated - encouraged, actually. The show isn't about trophies, but moments. That MTV itself isn't much in the music business anymore only makes the playing field clearer for provocation: Acting out here is like trashing a hotel room, not your house.

Accordingly, in recent years, the most memorable parts of the awards have been . . . not quite musical. There was the Kanye West-Taylor Swift kerfuffle, still reverberating after all this time. And then there was Miley Cyrus's coming-out party as a pop fire-starter, followed a couple of years later by her squaring off with Nicki Minaj.