Taylor Swift Says There’s More to the Kanye West Feud Than the Public Realized
Taylor Swift has famously feuded with Kanye West in public over the years, and in a new interview, she opens up about why she kept trying to patch things up between them before realizing it wasn't going to happen.
The roots of their feud go back to 2009, when West famously stage-bombed Swift while she was accepting her award for Best Female Video at the MTV Video Music Awards. She tells Rolling Stone that over the course of subsequent years, it was more important for her to move past that than she likes to admit.
"When someone doesn’t respect you so loudly and says you literally don’t deserve to be here — I just so badly wanted that respect from him, and I hate that about myself, that I was like, “This guy who’s antagonizing me, I just want his approval,'" she admits. "But that’s where I was. And so we’d go to dinner and stuff. And I was so happy, because he would say really nice things about my music. It just felt like I was healing some childhood rejection or something from when I was 19."
That changed when West asked Swift to present him with the Vanguard Award at the 2015 VMAs. She says West called her up and spoke to her for an hour, explaining all the reasons it would be so important to him if she would agree to present the award, "because he can be so sweet. He can be the sweetest. And I was so stoked that he asked me that. And so I wrote this speech up, and then we get to the VMAs and I make this speech and he screams, 'MTV got Taylor Swift up here to present me this award for ratings!'"
"And I’m standing in the audience with my arm around his wife, and this chill ran through my body. I realized he is so two-faced, That he wants to be nice to me behind the scenes, but then he wants to look cool, get up in front of everyone and talk s--t," Swift says.
Even so, she decided to try to move past it once again, so when she received a call from West asking about a line in his song, "Famous," that says, "I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex," she says she was touched that he felt the need to explain it. When she heard the finished song, though, that line was followed by, "Why? Because I made that bitch famous."
That was the end for Swift, and to make it worse, West's wife, Kim Kardashian, publicly released a portion of the call that had been tape-recorded in which Swift appears to give her permission for the line, though he does not tell her about the second part. It touched off a very nasty public feud that seems unlikely to get settled.
"...When I heard the song, I was like, 'I’m done with this. If you want to be on bad terms, let’s be on bad terms, but just be real about it,'" Swift states emphatically.
"Some events took place to cause me to be pissed off when he called me a bitch," she says. "That was not just a singular event. Basically, I got really sick of the dynamic between he and I. And that wasn’t just based on what happened on that phone call and with that song — it was kind of a chain reaction of things."
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