Lady Gaga's "Paparazzi" Performance at the 2009 VMAs

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Overview

Lady Gaga's "Paparazzi" Performance at the 2009 VMAs and the "I'm Your Biggest Fan" TikTok Trend refers to a live performance of Lady Gaga's song "Paparazzi" at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards and a lip dub trend on TikTok using a section of the performance where Gaga sings, "I'm your biggest fan I'll follow you until you love me," respectively. The theatric performance of the song, which features Gaga fake bleeding halfway through, has been praised as iconic in the years following, with some believing it was underappreciated because of Kanye West Interrupting Taylor Swift on the same night. The trend became popular on TikTok in August 2022.

History

On September 13th, 2009, Lady Gaga performed a set at MTV's 2009 VMA Awards show. One of the songs she performed was "Paparazzi." The performance is notably theatrical, featuring Lady Gaga acting unhinged and strangely throughout. Near the end of the performance, fake blood starts pouring down Gaga's body as she continues to perform (shown below).

On August 21st, 2019, Billboard^[1] published an article about how Kanye West interrupting Taylor Swift at that year's awards show drowned out how good Gaga's performance was

On September 10th, 2020, YouTuber^[2] Jremasters posted a 4k remaster of the performance, garnering over 615,000 views in two years (shown below).

"I'm Your Biggest Fan" TikTok Trend

In July 2022, TikTokers began using an audio clip of Gaga singing, "I'm your biggest fan I'll follow you until you love me," from the performance in lip dub videos, inspiring over 52,000 uses by early August. One of the first videos to go viral using the sound was posted by TikToker^[3] @whatwhyhow___ on July 17th, 2022 and makes a joke about thinking the bleeding in the performance is real, garnering over 4 million views in a month (show below).

https://www.tiktok.com/embed/v2/7121437871831207214

The majority of the videos make jokes about being someone's biggest fan and about the performance itself (examples shown below).

https://www.tiktok.com/embed/v2/7130176810490301702

https://www.tiktok.com/embed/v2/7125636151867608363

MTV's Animated Tribute Video

On August 10th, 2022, in the midst of the song's virality on TikTok, MTV published an animated tribute to the performance to YouTube,^[4] garnering over 23,000 views in a day (shown below).