Olivia Rodrigo Will Headline This Year’s VMAs

It’s been a tough year for everyone… except Olivia Rodrigo. The 18-year-old went from a Disney channel favourite on shows like Bizaardvark and High School Music: The Musical: The Series to an overnight sensation when a video she posted of her then-unreleased song went beyond viral on Tik Tok. Unless you’ve been on a total internet, news or, well, reality fast for the last year — and hey, we wouldn’t blame you! — then you know that the song was called “Driver’s License” and it’s become basically the most famous song in the world. Of course, a record deal quickly followed, as did her album, Sour, which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard charts. It spent, like, a million weeks at No. 1 and singles like “Good 4 U” and “Deja Vu” have made her the most famous person to come out of quarantine. Sourdough, who?

And though things have gotten rough with iso back in place around Aus, things are only getting better for Rodrigo. Are we jealous? Only a little.

Earlier this week MTV announced a few of the performers for this year’s VMAs and guess who is at the top of that list? The singer, who is up for some of this year’s biggest awards including Artist and Song of the Year, will be making her award show debut alongside a list of some other amazing artists, including Lil Nas X (maybe one of the only other performers having a year as good as Rodrigo), Lorde (who prob still won’t care if you think her performance is suss) and Machine Gun Kelly.

We’re betting right now that Olivia will be taking home all of the awards, which have been renamed the “Moonperson,” in an effort to make the show more gender neutral; the categories have also been renamed to ensure inclusivity. That’s not the only positive change: visual artist Kehinde Wiley has been tapped to redesign the Moonperson statues giving them some much needed colour.

The VMAs will take place September 12 and voting is open now. And while you wait to see what other exciting things MTV has in store for us, take a look back at some of the show’s most iconic moments that we will #neverforget.