Taylor Swift took home the top prize at the 2023 MTV Video Music Awards for her Anti-Hero music video on a night full of surprises. “This is unbelievable. The fact that this is a fan-voted award means so much to me,” Swift said in her acceptance speech. The show, held at the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey, was Swift’s from nearly the beginning.
Swift took home nine of the 11 awards that she was up for, including Artist of the Year, in a category made up entirely of women nominees for the first time in VMA history. Her Karma (remix) collaborator, Ice Spice, won the best new artiste award.
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Host Nicki Minaj performed her latest single, the dreamy Last Time I Saw You before jumping into a brand-new tease of a fiery new trap cut from her highly-anticipated Pink Friday 2 album.
K-pop boy band Tomorrow X Together and Brazilian superstar Anitta premiered their new collaboration, the glossy retro-pop of Back for More. Comedian Tiffany Haddish presented the award for ‘Best Afrobeats’ in the category’s inaugural year, given to Rema and Selena Gomez for their massive hit Calm Down.
Colombian icon Shakira received the Video Vanguard Award and performed an incredible bilingual medley of her decades of hits in a set introduced by her Hips Don’t Lie collaborator Wyclef Jean. “MTV, thank you for being such a big part of my career since I was only 18 years old,” Shakira said, also thanking her parents and her children, who she brought to the show.
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“This is for you my people, my Latin American people, inside and outside this country,” she said, as she switched to Spanish. “Thank you for inspiring me and for injecting me with so much strength and so much desire to move forward, I love you so much.” She also took home the award for best collaboration for TQG, her song with Karol G. The duo gave their acceptance speech entirely in Spanish.