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Before the MTV Video Music Awards settle into its annual teenybopper party, the ceremony will have a tender moment.
Janet Jackson will kick off the show on Sunday night with a tribute to her late brother. Michael Jackson's death on June 25 was soon-after followed by the BET Awards (where Janet Jackson also appeared), but MTV was the music network with which the King of Pop was more aligned.
Though MTV dragged its feet at first in showing the music videos of black artists, the network's meteoric rise in the 1980s came in tandem with Jackson's, whose music videos such as "Thriller" and "Bad" set the standard for the form.
The VMAs are familiar ground for the family. Janet Jackson has won nine VMAs. Michael Jackson famously opened the 1994 VMAs by kissing his then-wife, Lisa Marie Presley.
MTV will also premiere the trailer for "This Is It," the documentary about Jackson's preparations to hold 50 concerts in London.
"There's obviously lots of emotion around Michael and the memory of Michael, but I think it's going to be a pretty celebratory kind of night all around," said Dave Sirulnick, the show's executive producer and vice president of production at MTV. "It's all about that balance."
Sirulnick declined to give specifics to the Jackson tribute, but said that there's been "quite a few people working hard on it for quite a number of weeks now."
