The night the '90s actually ended: the 2001 MTV VMAs

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https://nostalgiabandit.com/the-nigh...2001-mtv-vmas/

By Jason DeBord
May 18, 2026



The Last Frivolous Night

The eighteenth MTV Video Music Awards aired live from the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center on the evening of Thursday, September 6, 2001. Jamie Foxx hosted his first VMAs that night. The show ran long.

The country had spent the late nineties bracing for Y2K — the predicted global computer collapse, the supplies-in-the-basement panic, the bunker rehearsal that turned out to be nothing. The whole thing had ended in a global shrug, and the room that night reflected that confidence. The disaster that was actually coming had been predicted by no one. It was five days away from this room.

The room was every flavor of pre-9/11 American pop culture inside one hall. Britney Spears performed “I’m a Slave 4 U” with an albino python draped across her shoulders. NSYNC performed “Pop” and Michael Jackson walked on at the end. Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice,” the Spike Jonze video of Christopher Walken tap-dancing through an empty hotel lobby, took home six awards. Jennifer Lopez arrived with her fiancé Chris Judd. Pamela Anderson arrived with Kid Rock. Macy Gray wore a dress that instructed viewers to buy her new album.

Limp Bizkit won Best Rock Video for “Rollin’.” The video had been filmed the previous year on the roof of the South Tower of the World Trade Center — twenty-two hours of shooting time, on top of one of the two tallest buildings in New York. Four days after the VMAs, on Monday, September 10, 2001, the band received a letter and a fruit basket from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey thanking them for featuring the towers in the video and congratulating them on the award. Fred Durst had the letter framed. He would later say it arrived on Monday and the attacks happened on Tuesday.

The past was already in the room before the future arrived. Aaliyah had been scheduled to present an award that night. Twelve days before the show, on Saturday, August 25, the twenty-two-year-old singer had been killed when an overloaded Cessna 402 went down on takeoff from Marsh Harbour Airport in the Bahamas, returning her from the filming of a music video. Janet Jackson, Missy Elliott, Timbaland, Ginuwine, and Aaliyah’s brother Rashad came onstage to remember her. A clip of Aaliyah speaking about her life played. The room went quiet, then loud again.

U2 received the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award. They brought the surviving Ramones onstage and dedicated the trophy to Joey Ramone, who had died of lymphoma five months earlier. (Joey died April 2001; Dee Dee Ramone would die the following year; Johnny in 2004.) The room applauded that, and the show kept moving.

Best Male Video was, on the face of it, the least likely category to register as the night’s pivot. The nominees were Eminem featuring Dido for “Stan,” Lenny Kravitz for “Again,” Nelly for “Ride Wit Me,” Robbie Williams for “Rock DJ,” and Moby featuring Gwen Stefani for “South Side.” “Stan” was, and remains, widely considered one of the most accomplished music videos of its era — a four-minute short film built around a letter from a fan who is about to drive his pregnant girlfriend off a bridge. Moby — bald, vegan, electronic, born Richard Melville Hall, with an ongoing public quarrel with Eminem over Eminem’s lyrics — won.

The “South Side” video, directed by Joseph Kahn, is a parody. Moby in garish fur. Fake gold teeth he visibly resents wearing. A convertible “cruise” filmed inside a studio with women and bottles of champagne and a car that never moves. Bare-room “artistic” shots of Moby and Stefani holding a single potted sunflower. Everything the video lampooned was happening, more or less, somewhere else in the room that night. It won anyway. Gwen Stefani, featured on the track, became the first female artist to win in the Best Male Video category. She would win Best Female Video the same night, featured on Eve’s “Let Me Blow Ya Mind.” Two trophies, both for being someone else’s vocalist.

When the Moonman for Best Male Video was handed out, it was routed — per MTV’s standard practice of that era, in which physical trophies went to the management company rather than the artist — to MCT Management. The plaque was engraved to Barry Taylor’s company.