Rumours about what on Earth really caused the now infamous outburst at this year’s MTV Video Music Awards have started to surface.

You probably know what actually happened onstage by now. The show’s been playing on a loop ever since, alongside witty commentary pointing out that grown men making young girls weepy is a rather rubbish thing to do. Kanye West has had to apologise not once but twice for making himself look like a twit – such a twit that one capital-letter-laden apology on his blog was not quite enough to cover it.

Now that both long-winded apologies are over and done with the world can move on to the next controversy. Wait, what’s that? We can’t?

Why not? Well, today the Internet has done that bothersome thing it does at times. It has started a rumour about who was really to blame for the events onstage as Taylor Swift attempted to accept her first ever VMA.

The Internet and ‘they’ have a nasty habit of rubbing salt into the wound. If you ask me, and no one did, the Internet and ‘they’ should be smacked on the bum at best, and banished from Internet Land at worst for telling people “It’s Beyonce what done it”.

A handful of media outlets have started to quote from a source at the awards. The source says that the Beyonce+Taylor Swift+Kanye=Boom incident was a staged stunt that backfired. Specifically, our friends who aren’t really our friends but we wish they were our friends as they seem like they’d be fun to get a pint with MSNBC have a snippet of gossip on their entertainment section to that effect. The item is tucked away carefully between douche-tastic Jon Gosselin quotes and a photo of a pasty-looking Justin Timberlake – that is the best place to hide gossip you don’t think anyone is ever really going to read.

According to MSNBC - via a source – the VMA outburst may have been the idea of Beyonce. However, she was allegedly not expecting Kanye to ‘bring her name into it’.

Sounds like bollocks to us, but it won’t be long until similar conspiracy theories come to light.

From MSNBC:

Taylor Swift and Kanye West — what’s next? As for Beyonce: Though most agree the move to bring Swift onstage to resume her acceptance speech was a classy one, some have speculated whether it was Beyonce’s idea or one her management came up with. “It was all Beyonce’s idea. Kanye embarrassed her by bringing her name into it,” said a source with firsthand knowledge of the situation. “She wanted to make it right.”

In any case, despite her initial and understandable upset, Taylor Swift may profit from this many times over. That’s the trade-off when you’re ambushed by a drunken rapper in front of everyone on the planet who has no desire to get to sleep at a reasonable hour or who owns a TV license.

From the same article:

But for the producers of the world, the incident has opportunity written all over it. Several production companies are now in a race to get Swift onstage for their shows — awards shows and New Years’ Eve shows alike — either to do a duet of some sort with West or with Beyonce.

This was a guest blog by Amy Grindhouse, who is alarmingly delightful.

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Stuff you, Michael Jackson! The biggest news story of the year isn’t your death any more – it’s Kanye West and Taylor Swift.

Or at least that’s what they’d have you believe. Because even though it was basically just one idiot hurting another idiot’s feelings for a second, Kanye West and Taylor Swift are steadfastly refusing to shut up about the MTV VMA incident.

The latest news is that Kanye West has now personally apologised to Taylor Swift. And if that apology involved anything more than bellowing “BOOOYAAAWWWW!!!! BOOOYAAAWWWW!!!! BOOOYAAAWWWW!!!! BOOOYAAAWWWW!!!! BOOOYAAAWWWW!!!!” into a telephone, we’re going to be sorely disappointed.

Look, we mean this. Stop. Kanye West and Taylor Swift, just stop. We can see where this is going, and we don’t like it. We’ve analysed this situation, and the slow thawing of the relationship between the two of you since Kanye West shattered Taylor Swift’s self-esteem at the MTV VMAs can only lead to one thing. That’s right – a hip-hop/tween-country mash-up cover of Endless Love by Lionel Richie and Diana Ross. Aside from the middle eight – which would invariably involve Kanye West repeatedly shrieking the word “BOOOYAAAWWWW!!!!” over a banjo solo – it’s a terrible idea.

Kanye West has already shown that his actions at the MTV VMAs have affected him profoundly – he looked distraught during his televised apology, although that may have been because the memory of his dead mother had just been callously invoked by a man with a face like a mangled foot – and now he’s taken his apology to Taylor Swift personally.

Maybe this was sincere, or maybe it was because Taylor Swift had just appeared on The View to talk about the incident and Kanye knew that the last thing he needed was a shrill nimrod like Elisabeth Hasselbeck on his case as well. But, whatever the reason, Kanye West yesterday telephoned Taylor to give a heartfelt apology that, if we know Kanye, was mostly about himself and had too many exclamation marks in it. ABC reports:

Representatives from “The View” said West called Swift after her appearance on today’s show, and she accepted his apology. Swift later told ABC News Radio, “Kanye did call me and he was very sincere in his apology, and I accepted that apology.”

Thank heavens for that. Because we’ve seen situations like this unfold before and, if Taylor Swift chose not to accept Kanye West’s apology, then he’d be forced to apologise to country music community leaders before embarking on a month-long rehab program. And then he’d have to make a number of PSAs about the importance of not negatively comparing country singers to Beyonce on television when you’ve got what appears to be a medieval maze shaved into the side of your head. After all, this tactic worked for Mel Gibson and Isaiah Washington, didn’t it?

But still, at least now the war is over. All this fuss over 30 seconds of an MTV awards show. The world is full of big, important issues that need to be addressed, and this is what everyone decides to focus on? It makes us sick. At least now we’re freed up to concentrate on something a little more worthy of our time. Like, say, Kate Gosselin’s new haircut. Have you SEEN that thing?

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Kanye West has already apologised once for hopping onstage at the MTV VMAs and stamping on Taylor Swift’s heart.

But that’s not enough. Because, as we all know, an apology isn’t really an apology if it’s bellowed across the internet, peppered with several thousand exclamation marks and features the word ‘BOOOYAAAWWWW!!!!’ or any related forms thereof. Which is why Kanye West apologised again on TV last night.

If fact, Kanye West announced that because of his VMA behaviour, he’s going to “take some time off and analyse… how I’m going to improve”. So that’s the last we’ll see of him, then.

It’s hard to know who to side with over this whole Kanye West/ Taylor Swift MTV VMA thing, isn’t it? On one hand it was completely wrong of Kanye West to barge up onstage, rip the microphone out of Taylor Swift’s hands and tell her that she didn’t deserve to win because she wasn’t as good as Beyonce. Because, whichever way you look at it, he cruelly shot down Taylor’s big moment.

But on the other hand, Kanye West was sort of right about her video not being very good. Plus, right after he’d finished Taylor Swift sort of looked like somebody had punched a hole in her chest and, really, who doesn’t delight in the misery of others? Plus, Kanye West got to bust out the word ‘BOOOYAAAWWWW!!!!’ during his unfathomable internet apology to Taylor Swift. You know what? Looking at it like this, we actually think we’re on Kanye West’s side here.

It’s a shame that Kanye West isn’t, though. Thanks to a mixture of bad timing and a desperate need to make Jay Leno’s new show look less like the big bag of warmed-up sick that it actually is, Kanye West was last night made to atone for his actions.

But at least nobody got carried away. After all, nobody died. It was just a moment of oddness that raised the profile of everybody involved, and the incident should be treated as nothing more than a brief ephemeral curiosity that won’t really affect anyone’s life in the slightest.

Of course, when we say ‘nobody got carried away’ we meant nobody except for Jay Leno, who decided to ask Kanye West what his recently-dead mother would think about the incident. But at least Kanye West didn’t over-react. It’s not like he announced a temporary retirement from music just because he made a slightly annoying country singer a little bit sad for a couple of seconds, is it? Is it?

“I’m ashamed that my hurt caused someone else’s hurt. After this, I need to just take some time off and analyse how I’m going to make it through the rest of this life, how I’m going to improve, because I am a celebrity and that’s just something I’m going to have to deal with.”

Oh, it is. Nice job of keeping everything in proportion, chaps.

Incidentally, if Kanye West is looking for ways to improve, then we’ve got some advice for him – try to use the word BOOOYAAAWWWW!!!!’ a bit less. No, wait. More. Use it more. That’d be much better.

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Seriously, when will you people learn? It’s rule number one when it comes to organising awards shows, but you always ignore it.

Never invite Kanye West. That’s it. It’s a fundamental awards show rule. Invite Kanye West and he’ll invariably end up losing an award he assumed he’d win, shrieking indignantly about it for 30 minutes and then pooing in his pants on purpose while refusing to break eye contact with the camera. It always happens. Never invite Kanye West.

Just ask Taylor Swift, whose MTV VMA acceptance speech Kanye West obliterated last night because he thought she wasn’t very good.

Ahead of last night’s MTV VMAs, we were trying to predict where the obligatory outrage would stem from this year. The smart money was on host Russell Brand – who last year offended everyone by mocking virgins – once again ramming his foot into his mouth. Or maybe Britney Spears would stumble around in a bikini again. Or maybe there’d be another redneck punch-up over a funny-looking booby model.

But no. The answer was right under our nose all along. It was almost too obvious – Kanye West would behave like a self-regarding prick. Of course he would. That’s Kanye West’s bread and butter. Strip away all the grating egomania and what does that leave Kanye West with? A weird album that sounds like Johnny 5 self-harming and nothing else, that’s what.

So what form did Kanye West’s MTV VMAs exhibition of prickishness take? Was it that he didn’t win an award that he thought he deserved, again? Or that he didn’t get to perform at the exact point in the ceremony that he wanted to, again? No. It was because Taylor Swift won the MTV VMA award for Best Female Video and Beyonce didn’t. There’s video, although we’re legally obliged to point out that the following images may be disturbing for readers with an unusually low tolerance for profound awkwardness…

It’s the perfect video, isn’t it? Everything you could ever want, encapsulated into one perfect minute – Beyonce looking as if she genuinely wants to die, Kanye West realising three quarters of the way through his rant that maybe he’s coming off as a bit of a prick and, best of all, Taylor Swift’s utterly distraught face 57 seconds in. Like we said, perfect.

However, after being escorted from the ceremony, Kanye West had a change of heart and apologised to Taylor Swift the only way he knows how – with a hard-to-read, all-caps, over-punctuated blog that contains the word ‘Boooyaaawwww’. Look:

“I’M SOOOOO SORRY TO TAYLOR SWIFT AND HER FANS AND HER MOM. I SPOKE TO HER MOTHER RIGHT AFTER AND SHE SAID THE SAME THING MY MOTHER WOULD’VE SAID. SHE IS VERY TALENTED! I LIKE THE LYRICS ABOUT BEING A CHEERLEADER AND SHE’S IN THE BLEACHERS! …………………… I’M IN THE WRONG FOR GOING ON STAGE AND TAKING AWAY FROM HER MOMENT!…………….. I’M SORRY TO MY FANS IF I LET YOU GUYS DOWN!!!! I’M SORRY TO MY FRIENDS AT MTV. I WILL APOLOGIZE TO TAYLOR 2MRW. WELCOME TO THE REAL WORLD!!!! EVERYBODY WANNA BOOOOO ME BUT I’M A FAN OF REAL POP CULTURE!!! I’M STILL HAPPY FOR TAYLOR!!!! BOOOYAAAWWWW!!!! YOU ARE VERY VERY TALENTED!!! I’M NOT CRAZY YALL, I’M JUST REAL. SORRY FOR THAT!!! I REALLY FEEL BAD FOR TAYLOR AND I’M SINCERELY SORRY!!! MUCH RESPECT!!!!!”

Oh Kanye West, we can’t stay mad at you. True, you might be an obnoxious, overbearing prick with a confused sense of your own importance and a craving for approval that’s actually quite pitiful to witness, but you know what would have happened if you hadn’t stormed the stage at the MTV VMAs last night? We’d have been forced to write about Taylor Swift’s winning video. Bleurgh.

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The MTV VMAs always excite – they only reward the best, most exciting, most innovative artists working today.

Or Britney Spears, which is what happened last year. But given that no major pop stars have had terrifying nervous breakdowns and then agreed to make a documentary for MTV that’s basically 90 minutes of them sobbing forlornly this year, hopefully the VMAs will be business as usual.

Except this year’s MTV VMA nominations have just been announced and, along with Beyonce, Lady Gaga has gained the most nods. So by ‘business as usual’ we mean ‘tedious, deliberately controversial, badly dressed and worryingly mannish’.

Last year’s MTV VMA show was, by all accounts, a bit of a failure. Russell Brand, the host, managed to alienate swathes of viewers and some of the winners within seconds of setting foot onstage, and the big winner of the night was Britney Spears, a barely-comprehensible blonde lunatic who’d just released a woeful sort-of electronic pop album and was probably most famous for her gross inability to keep her clothes on in public.

It was rubbish. But at least the MTV VMA organisers know better than to make that same mistake again, which is why this year’s MTV VMAs will be hosted by, um, Russell Brand. And, judging by the VMA nominations, the biggest winner of the night looks set to be, er, Lady Gaga, a barely-comprehensible blonde lunatic who’s just released a woeful sort-of electronic pop album and is probably most famous for her gross inability to keep her clothes on in public.

Great, nice one MTV.

But anyway, although Lady Gaga has somehow managed to pick up nine MTV VMA nominations – including Video Of The Year, Best Female Video, Best Cinematography and Most Conspicuous Adam’s Apple On A Female Pop Star – she’s not the only nominee. Beyonce has also picked up nine VMA nominations, mostly for Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It). And, as UPI reports, she sounds quite pleased about it:

“I’m excited and honored to be tied for most-nominated for the VMAs,” Beyonce said in a statement. “I’ve been blessed this year to have ‘Single Ladies’ become a video people really connected with and responded to. I’ve spent so much time watching all the great versions people created all around the world. It’s beautiful to feel you touch people and bring a song to life with a video.”

‘Connected with’ and ‘responded to’ obviously being pop star code for ‘felt dirty watching’ and ‘ejaculated to’. You can’t fool us, Beyonce.

But anyway, Lady Gaga and Beyonce aren’t guaranteed to win all of the awards they’ve been nominated for – Britney Spears got seven VMA nominations, while Kanye West, Eminem and Coldplay each picked up four. Green Day picked up three nominations – presumably all for Most Dreary, Self-Important And Disappointingly Middle-Aged Album – and Jay-Z picked up two.

We’ll find out who’ll emerge triumphant when the MTV VMAs are broadcast next month. Or to be more specific, since the show will feature performances by Pink, Green Day and Taylor Swift, we’ll find out who emerged triumphant the following day by reading a list of winners on the internet. Seriously, Taylor Swift? We’re not mental.

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As the host of the MTV VMA awards, it was Russell Brand’s job to gee up the audience and remind everyone about the awe-inspiring spectacle they were witnessing. That’s technically not what Russell Brand did, though – what he did was slag off all virgins for being rubbish and then get shouted down by a tubby virgin from American Idol for it.

But it’s OK, because The Jonas Brothers – the virgin pioneers, the virgins that all other virgins aspire to be, the virgins that Russell Brand spent most of the MTV VMAs mocking for their preposterous purity rings – have forgiven Russell Brand for his comments about them. Which might make them seem like the bigger men, but let’s not forget – they are virgins, so they’re definitely not.

We thought we had this tween pop thing nailed, you know. All you need to do is get a pretty-looking teenage girl, make her sing a bunch of wholesome pop songs about how special everyone is if they believe in themselves and then act all surprised when they inevitably take all their clothes off on the internet.

But no, apparently some of these tweeny-poppers actually take the idea of virginity pretty seriously. So seriously, in fact, that they’ve taken to wearing purity rings to show the world that they’re never ever having sex until they’re married. Ever. Presumably this is because their religious beliefs are stronger than their desire for physical intimacy, and also because they all love On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan so much that they want to reenact it word for messy word one day.

Given the prevalence of this chastity movement at the moment, it seems a little odd that the man picked to host the most purity-ringish MTV VMAs in history was Russell Brand – a man so constantly lust-demented that he can actually get people pregnant just by saying their name out loud three times in a row.

And when the unstoppably horny force of Russell Brand collided with the immovably chaste object of a bunch of teenage virgins at the MTV VMAs, there was only ever going to be one outcome. That came when, after Russell Brand had dedicated the majority of his airtime to ridiculing the purity rings worn by anaemic genital-free catalogue model virgins The Jonas Brothers, Jordin Sparks from American Idol told him off, saying that not everyone was a slut.

Which is definitely true – there are plenty of famous teenage girls who definitely aren’t sluts. Jamie Lynn Spears isn’t a slut, for example, and nor is Bristol Palin. True, that’s because they’re either too busy looking after their newborn baby or getting so swollen and pregnant-looking that no boys will go near them to be sluts, but that doesn’t matter.

But, just as it looked like Russell Brand had flushed his chances of American success down the toilet forever with his controversial anti-virgin stance, The Jonas Brothers have ridden to the rescue and forgiven him, noting that he did mumble a half-hearted semi-sincere apology under his breath at the end of the night. They told Radio 1:

“For us it’s cool to see that he recognises we are gentleman. …I think he did a good job. We saw him on Conan O’Brien and thought he was hilarious.”

And with that everything was OK again. Russell Brand has emerged from the MTV VMAs as a kind of rebel anti-hero, The Jonas Brothers have shown that they can be courteous even though they’re essentially rubbish virgins and – thanks to Miley Cyrus‘ continued use of a purity ring – a whole generation of American teenage girls will continue to believe that they can roll around on boys’ laps in their underwear, go topless for glossy magazines and take photos of themselves in the shower and God’s basically cool with it so long as nobody sticks anything up anyone else.

We love a happy ending.

So there’s obviously no better time to publish a book about Britney Spears; primarily her struggle with mental illness and her amazing revival. Admittedly it’s still early days – Britney could have a relapse tomorrow and start throwing animals off motorway bridges, rendering the whole book obsolete – but there’s nothing like striking while the iron’s hot, is there?

That’s what Britney Spears’ mother Lynne Spears thinks, because her Britney Spears book Through The Storm comes out next week. Copies have already leaked, and it seems it’s more about what a brave and inspiring mother Lynne is than anything else. Which is true – Lynne Spears has bravely inspired us never to have kids in case we end up raising them as terribly as she’s done with hers.

We’ve always thought that Lynne Spears was an excellent mother. No really, we did. It must be harder than it looks to have two children and then deprive them of a normal childhood so that you can relentlessly pursue your dream of living vicariously through your childstar offspring, only to watch it blow up in your face when they become so maladjusted to real life that one of them gets knocked up while still at school and the other one shaves her hair off in public and calls herself the devil.

For that, Lynne Spears deserves a medal. It’s true.

She won’t get one, of course, so second-best is her new book Through The Storm. You might remember Through The Storm as the parenting guide that Lynne Spears was going to publish right before Britney went barmy and Jamie Lynn got herself pregnant. Well, realising that reading a parenting guide by Lynne Spears would be a bit like reading Dr Harold Shipman’s Guide To Looking After Granny, Lynne scrapped that idea and decided to retool the book as an explosive tell-all.

We already knew that the book would claim that Britney Spears was sex-and-drugged to the wazoo by the time she was 15, but now the Associated Press has managed to snatch a look at a preview copy of the Through The Storm, and has given it a little summary. SPOILER ALERT: Britney Spears goes a bit mental near the end:

In “Through the Storm,” Lynne Spears presents herself as a loving, selfless (she gave up her job as a school teacher for her daughter’s sake) but increasingly powerless parent. After the jolting, but pleasant surprise of Britney Spears’ debut smash, ” … Baby One More Time,” Lynne Spears says she felt she was losing control when a 1999 Rolling Stone magazine story featured a racy cover of the singer in panties and a bra.

And that’s where it all went wrong, you see. Not several years earlier when Lynne Spears decided to bring Britney up in the public spotlight to ensure that she’d constantly spend the rest of her craving approval from strangers – or when she let Britney Spears’ first video involve schoolgirl uniforms and creepy allusions to sexual violence – but when she got her bra out in a music magazine. Sounds fair.

Anyway, none of that matters any more because, as we all saw at the MTV VMAs on Sunday night, Britney Spears is absolutely back, completely well and as clear-headed and normal as you could ever wish to be. We know this for a fact because she didn’t have lipstick smeared all over her face and wasn’t arbitrarily lunging at children and making them cry.

Lynne Spears must be kicking herself about that, because now Through The Storm looks like an uplifting story about courage in the face of adversity, and we hear she was really going for the whole ‘ghoulish car-crashy exploitative last shot at fame’ demographic. Shame.

Which is obviously a massive lie. Everyone knew that Britney Spears was opening the MTV VMAs last night – the press release, endless media coverage, MTV VMA promo spots and commemorative ‘Hey, Did Anyone Mention That Britney Spears Is Opening The MTV VMAs This Year?’ noddyheads made sure about that – but nobody knew how she’d do it.

And the answer was simple – by walking onstage, reading about three sentences mentioning that she was opening the MTV VMAs and then walking offstage again. And best of all, Britney Spears only messed up one word of it. Welcome back, Britney. You’re so much nicer when you’re robotically dull.

The MTV VMAs are always a big deal, provided you’re 13 and still care about MTV, but last year’s show was perhaps the biggest deal ever – it was the year when Britney Spears threw away her entire career by not hiding her hair extensions very well and looking confused.

But what a difference a year makes. That performance jolted Britney into concentrating on her comeback, which she did by failing to promote her album, having a breakdown on a pavement, locking her son in a bathroom with her until the police were called , getting taken to a mental hospital, being medically diagnosed as Gravely Disabled, losing custody of her kids forever and going on a sitcom a couple of times. It’s basically the same way that Sylvester Stallone prepared for his fight against Dolph Lundgren in Rocky 4.

But all of that paid off last night, when Britney Spears made her massively-hyped comeback at the VMAs. What would it involve, we wondered beforehand. A song? A surprise walk-on spot during someone else’s performance? Or would Britney Spears go all out and give us all what we wanted – a stiffly-delivered spoken word introduction that barely lasts ten seconds and yet still manages to mangle the word ‘anniversary’ into a completely brand new form?

Oh Britney, you never let us down, do you?

“Thank you so much. Thank you for all the love. I’m here tonight to celebrate a very important birthday, the 25th anniversity of the VMAs. This is the 2008 MTV Video Music Awards and it starts right now.”

But that wasn’t the last sighting of Britney Spears at the VMAs, though – she also triumphed in the awards themselves, winning Best Video, Best Pop Video, Best Female and the unofficial Oh Christ How Many Awards Do We Have To Promise Her To Make Sure She Turns Up award.

Other highlights of the MTV VMAs included Christina Aguilera wanting to be Katy Perry so badly it was sort of awkward to watch, Kanye West debuting his new single – a brave new mix of dance music and accidentally off-kilter singing, and a virgin throwing a tantrum at Russell Brand because Russell Brand said virgins were stupid or something.

But the night undoubtedly belonged to Britney Spears, who showed what an incredible turnaround her life has gone through since last year’s debacle. Who knows, give it another decade or two and Britney might even be ready to actually sing.