It’s the ridiculous feud that just won’t die.
On his recent Tidal-released album The Life of Pablo, Kanye West took a left-field shot at Taylor Swift. “For all my Southside niggas that know me best / I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / Why? I made that bitch famous / God damn / I made that bitch famous,” he raps on the track “Famous.”
The incident West was referring to was, of course, the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, where a Hennessy’d-up West stormed the stage, snatched the microphone from Swift, and proclaimed that Beyoncé should’ve won instead, forever immortalizing the words “I’mma let you finish, but…”
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Swift addressed the lyrics while accepting the 2016 Grammy Award for Album of the Year—an award that she won over the far more deserving Kendrick Lamar for his brilliant LP To Pimp a Butterfly.
“As the first woman to win Album of the Year at the Grammys twice, I wanna say to all the young women out there: There are going to be people along the way who will try to undercut your success, or take credit for your accomplishments or your fame, but if you just focus on the work and you don’t let those people sidetrack you, someday when you get where you’re going, you’ll look around and you’ll know that it was you and the people who love you that put you there, and that will be the greatest feeling in the world,” said Swift.
The inclusion of the Swift lyrics on “Famous” is strange given that back in August, she presented him with the Video Vanguard Award at the VMAs, where she said The College Dropout was the first album she bought on iTunes, and claimed that the two were friends.
Well, it seems they’re again on the outs. While West alleged that he didn’t diss Swift, that the lyrics were cleared with her in advance and she “gave her blessings,” and that they were actually her idea—not so, according to Swift’s representative.
“Kanye did not call for approval,” said her rep, “but to ask Taylor to release his single ‘Famous’ on her Twitter account. She declined and cautioned him about releasing a song with such a strong misogynistic message. Taylor was never made aware of the actual lyric, ‘I made that bitch famous.’”
