Inside pop culture’s 15 seconds of shame
How two superstars and four words would influence the music industry for the next decade
Whether you were watching from a couch or in the control room at Radio City Music Hall where the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards were taking place, it was the rare moment in our culture where everyone had the same reaction: Did that actually just happen?
One minute, 19-year-old Taylor Swift was accepting the prize for female video of the year. Then, Kanye West snatched her microphone and delivered the quote that would shape the next decade for two of music’s biggest superstars:
“Yo, Taylor, I’m really happy for you, I’mma let you finish. But Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time.”
Beyoncé, in the audience, gaped in horror. “Oh, Kanye,” she mouthed.
West handed the mic back to a dazed Swift. The crowd started booing. One of Swift’s band members leaped to her feet, leading a standing ovation for her humiliated boss.
As he watched the chaos from a production truck on that night of Sunday, Sept. 13, Van Toffler, the president of MTV Networks Music Group, was in shock.
“It was like someone shot Bambi in front of the world,” Toffler recalls.
Kanye and Taylor. Taylor and Kanye. The Nashville songwriting prodigy and the hip-hop phenom shared little in common, but those 15 seconds left them intertwined in ways neither could have anticipated. Over the next decade they both transcended music stardom, ascending to a stratosphere of fame where both became recognizable by their first names to people who couldn’t name a single one of their songs.
That incident was also spectacular television — a badly needed shot in the arm for the VMAs. The show had once been legendary for water-cooler antics such as Madonna tongue-kissing Britney Spears, but it had lost its buzz.
The Kanye-Taylor moment raised the bar for other awards shows, which sought to manufacture their own “moments” in the social media era.
Hamish Hamilton, who directed the telecast, will never forget seeing West storm the stage. He turned to the producers and said, “Oh my God, this is TV gold.”
Yet in that moment, Toffler was mortified. He snapped into crisis-management mode, turning to a colleague who was friendly with West. “Go find Kanye and please find a way to escort him out of the building,” he remembers saying. “I’ll find Taylor.”
He found her sobbing backstage, flanked by her mother and management team. Toffler tried to comfort her, but she was scheduled to perform You Belong With Me — her prize-winning song that night — in about five minutes.
Toffler raced back to the control truck and happened to bump into Beyoncé. She appeared “shaken,” he said, so he hinted to the star that her song Single Ladies was going to win the final trophy of the night: video of the year. If she stuck around, Toffler suggested, maybe she could help redeem Swift’s ruined evening.
In the waning minutes of the telecast, Beyoncé glided to the stage to accept her trophy. “I remember being 17 years old, up for my first MTV Award with Destiny’s Child,” she told the room. “And it was one of the most exciting moments in my life. So I’d like for Taylor to come out and have her moment.”
Swift re-emerged. The audience went wild. “Um,” Swift said. “Maybe we could try this again?”
Everyone had an opinion about what Kanye did. Even President Barack Obama weighed in, accidentally. “He’s a jackass,” Obama said in what he believed was offthe-record banter before a TV interview — a line overheard by another reporter, who promptly tweeted it.
West’s apology on his blog (“I’m sooooo sorry to taylor swift and her fans and her mom ... She is very talented! ... i’m in the wrong for going on stage and taking away from her moment!”) did little to stem the outrage. West’s co-headlining tour with Lady Gaga was abruptly cancelled.
But there was an uncomfortable undercurrent to much of the reaction, which hip-hop journalist and editor Tracii McGregor says seemed to cast West as the angry black man going after the demure young white woman. “It looked really bad,” she said.
He already had a reputation, of course. In 2005, West blurted out during a televised Hurricane Katrina fundraiser that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” West, who was already an A-list producer before he released a string of platinum records, had also publicly sulked about his own losses at earlier awards shows. Critics chalked it up to a monstrous ego and a lack of self-control. The VMAs episode only cemented this perception.
There were some hints that West might have some deeper issues. It would be years before he opened up about his mental health struggles, as he was hospitalized in 2016 under a psychiatric hold after erratic behaviour on tour, and two years later, revealed his bipolar diagnosis on his album Ye.
Making her Saturday Night Live debut in November 2009, Swift paused dramatically in the middle of the comic tune that served as her opening monologue.
“You might be expecting me to say something bad about Kanye, and how he ran up on the stage and ruined my VMA ...” she sang, as the audience tittered expectantly. “But there’s nothing more to say, cause everything’s OK, I got security lining the stage!” Two SNL cast members ran out, dressed as guards, holding up a police sketch of West.
Swift wasn’t yet a global pop megastar. But, she was publicity savant.
In those years following the incident, as she rose to become one of the biggest stars on the planet, Swift, at times, seemed to cling to the role of the damsel with the microphone ripped from her hand, awash in public sympathy and affirmation.
Everything seemed to finally come full circle at the 2015 VMAs, as Swift presented West with a lifetime-achievement award. “I’m really happy for you, and I’mma let you finish,” she joked. “But Kanye West has had one of the greatest careers of all time!”
Their redemption story disintegrated a year later. In 2016, West invoked Swift in his new song, Famous, with a lyric far more direct than her own coy call-outs: “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex ... why? I made that bitch famous.” The video featured naked look-alikes of Swift. She decried it as misogynistic “revenge porn.”
A tawdry dispute ensued. Following the release of Famous, Swift’s 1989 won album of the year at the Grammys. In her acceptance speech, she made a comment that many interpreted as a dig at West: “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.”
West’s interruption may have been appalling, yet Single Ladies was a dazzling, pace-setting video for a song now recognized as the earworm of the decade. Its loss to the less-epic You Belong With Me underscored the way works by black artists, particularly women, are often ignored or diminished. West was ahead of his time. The incident also taught TV producers how to up their game in the age of social media; how something that lit up Twitter or Facebook could inspire others to tune in, including Ellen DeGeneres posting a selfie at the Oscars. People still say “I’mma let you finish.”
That mic grab set the stage for the next decade of awardsshow controversies and made-for-social-media virality. But more than that, it cemented Kanye and Taylor as cultural figures who would be with us for a long while.