The "Lil Mama Is" Movement is Born After "Lip Gloss" Star Crashes VMAs Stage

Kanye West wasn't the only one to crash the Radio City Music Hall stage at the Video Music Awards; he was just the loudest. As we reported in our live blog last night, Jay-Z and Alicia Keys' performance of The Blueprint 3's "Empire State of Mind" was hijacked in its closing seconds by "Lip Gloss" aficionado and America's Best Dance Crew judge Lil Mama. We're still not entirely sure why Lil Mama came onstage — perhaps she wanted to take the mic and express her disappointment that Jigga opted for "Empire" instead of "Off That," or stage-crashing has become the equivalent of streaking at a baseball game ̬ but Mama issued a statement today through her publicist explaining her actions, MTV reports.

"I did not mean any disrespect towards Jay-Z or Alicia Keys," Lil Mama said in the statement. "I admire them and look up to them as role models. 'Empire State of Mind' had my emotions running high. In that moment I came up onstage to celebrate my two icons singing about NY." Her emotions were running so high, the only way she could unleash them was by coming uninvited onstage and crossing her arms while Jigga and Keys stood on the opposite side of the catwalk. Reviewing the video tape, we hear Jay-Z utter the words "T-Paining" after Lil Mama comes onstage. Lil Mama's friend T-Pain was one of Jay's biggest targets in "D.O.A.," so maybe this was all some sorry form of revenge — or a reference to T-Pain's own stage-crashing habit?

Meanwhile, Twitter is having fun with the Lil Mama debacle with a #lilmamais trending topic, which is currently Number Two on Twitter, two spots ahead of any mention of Kanye West, the evening's true star. Wikipedia is also having a laugh with Lil Mama, adding to her resume a nomination in the MTV Video Music Award for Best Stage Hop category for "I'm With Jay-Z and Alicia."

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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