Rihanna will receive the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award at the 2016 MTV Video Music Awards to be held at New York’s Madison Square Garden on August 28.
Rihanna will be the last addition to the Video Vanguard Award earners, following artists like Madonna, Beyonce, Justin Timberlake and Guns N’ Roses.
The Video Vanguard Award is the highest honor to receive at the VMA, and with it being named after legendary musician Michael Jackson for his enormous contributions to music, it is evident.
Rihanna is slated to perform at the ceremony and is also nominated for four VMA’s this year: Best Female Video for “Work” in which Drake appears, Best Male Video for contributing to Calvin Harris’ “This Is What You Came For” and the two of them also for Best Collaboration.
Thanks to music videos like “Umbrella”, “We Found Love” and more recent “Work”, her YouTube have over 9.6 billion views.
Rihanna’s ‘Anti’
‘Anti’ is her eighth studio album and it was released January 28.
She worked on the album from 2014 to 2015 on which she released three singles that were not added to the record at the end. One of them was the internationally acclaimed single “FourFiveSeconds”.
“Work” was released as the lead single from the album on January 27. The song features the Canadian rapper Drake and it is nominated for two VMA. Rihanna announced that “Kiss It Better” and “Needed Me” would be released as the album’s second and third singles respectively.
MTV Video Music Awards 2016
MTV posted the nominees for the VMA a couple of weeks ago, and Beyonce is leading the list. The former Video Vanguard Award winner is coming on top with 11 nominations, the most she has had in one year, followed by Adele with eight nominations, being 7 of them for “Hello.”
One of “Hello” nominations is for Video of the Year, in which she competes against Beyonce’s “Formation”, Justin Bieber’s “Sorry” and Drake’s “Hotline Bling”.
Kanye West’s recognized music video “Famous” is also nominated for Video of the Year. The video became very popular for featuring apparently naked pictures of celebrities and famous people including Taylor Swift, Donald Trump, Bill Cosby, and his wife, Kim Kardashian. The song is at the center of a war between Swift and Kardashian.
Late singer David Bowie was nominated for cinematography, direction, editing and art direction for “Lazarus” in which he appeared laying in a bed and with bandages in his eyes. The video was released a couple of days before his death from cancer on January 10.
The online voting was available on the VMA website since Tuesday last week.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter