Don’t blame Kanye West for his attention-grabbing jabs at Taylor Swift — he’s just holding a mirror up to society.
The always-expressive rapper stoked the embers of his lingering feud with Swift yet again during a Philippines show this weekend, defending his 2009 VMAs outburst and the song it inspired by claiming he’d just “said what everybody else was thinking.”
“In the spirit of Nina Simone, in the spirit of real artists, this is the song that broke the writer’s block for me because it’s something I wanted to say so bad that they told me I couldn’t say,” West reflected on his new rap, “Famous,” in a fan-recorded video.
“That night when I went onstage was the beginning of the end of my life ... You know what night I’m talking about. When I just said what everybody else was thinking,” he continued. “So if I get in trouble for saying the truth, what’s being said the rest of the time?”
The 38-year-old rapper memorably commandeered a mic at the MTV fete as Swift accepted the best female video award, proclaiming that Beyoncé had made “one of the best videos of all time. Of all time!”
The ensuing years found West attempting to apologize on “The Tonight Show” in 2009, Swift subtly forgiving him on her track “Innocent” in 2010, West retracting his apology in 2013, and the duo eventually making nice onstage at the 2015 VMAs.
But the rapper-turned-shoe mogul stirred up a fresh batch of drama this year with “Famous,” which contained the lyric “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / Why? I made that b---h famous (God Damn), I made that b---h famous” — a line Swift deftly condemned with a sly feminist barb during her Grammys speech in February.
Kanye West has a new explanation for dissing Taylor Swift.
West has waffled between contrition and unabashed ranting in response to backlash over his lyric. Following the Grammys, he claimed he wanted “the best” for Swift — then yelled during a nightclub show days later that she “had two seconds to be cool and she f---ed it up.”
This time, he waxed sincere about the struggles of artistry.
“I had to fight every day of my life, with the whole world turned against me, for saying out loud what everyone else felt,” he said during the concert.
“But that’s the job of an artist, of a true artist: not to be controlled by their finances, not to be controlled by perceptions, but only to be controlled by their truth.”