Taylor and Kanye
How two superstars, four words and 15 seconds of TV influenced a decade of pop culture
Whether you were watching from a couch, a dorm, a bar 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, an effusive 19-year-old Taylor Swift, sparkling in silver sequins, was accepting the prize for female video of the year, gushing about what an honor it was to win a popmusic VMA as a country singer.then, suddenly, a sunglasses-clad 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.
“One of the best videos of all time!” West continued.
He handed the mic back to a dazed Swift. The confused crowd, which seconds earlier cheered to hear Beyoncé’s name, 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 Sept. 13, Van Toffler was in shock. Then the president of MTV Networks Music Group, he’d had a hell of a time luring Swift out of her lucrative and controlled country-music bubble to appear at the raucous annual pop spectacle in the first place. And now this had to happen.
“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. They became the celebrities you couldn’t help but have strong opinions about, in large part because their actions seemed to hit every fault line of culture — race, gender, mental health, victimhood, media and politics.
That inciting incident in their tangled story 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 lately lost its buzz to such an extent that producers had trouble that year even wrangling the cast of “True Blood” to attend.
But the Kanye-taylor moment raised the bar for other awards shows, which sought to manufacture their own “moments,” and alerted TV execs to the electric new potential of live broadcasts in the social media era. (Twitter, still in its toddlerhood, virtually exploded that night.) It launched thousands of memes, back when we were still trying to figure out what “memes” were, and a catchphrase we’re still not done with: I’mma let you finish ... .
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 particular moment, Toffler was truly 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 prizewinning song that night and her biggest pop crossover hit to date — in about five minutes.
Meanwhile, the starstudded crowd, which included Pink, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga and Perez Hilton, was still buzzing from the unexpected interruption.
Toffler raced back to the control truck and bumped into Beyoncé. She appeared “shaken,” he said, so he decided on the spot to break awards-show protocol. He hinted to the star that “Single Ladies” — her megahit song that West had rushed the stage to champion — was going to win the final and most prestigious 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, resplendent in a red gown. “I’d like for Taylor to come out and have her moment.”
Swift reemerged. The audience went wild. “Um,” Swift said. “Maybe we could try this again?”
Opinions abound
“What happened to you as a child?? Did you not get hugged enough??” Kelly Clarkson wrote on her blog.
“It’s like u stepped on a kitten,” tweeted Katy Perry.
Everyone had an opinion about what Kanye did. The VMAS were viewed by 11 million people that year, though the crush of coverage after the fact was more comparable to that of a Super Bowl, which typically gets 10 times as many viewers.
Even President Barack Obama weighed in, accidentally. “He’s a jackass,” Obama said in what he believed was off-the-record banter before a TV interview.
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.
A rare appeal for perspective came from Jay-z, Beyoncé’s husband and West’s longtime collaborator. Sure, West’s interruption was “inappropriate,” he told a radio interviewer, but “He didn’t kill anybody. No one got harmed.”
West already had a reputation, of course. In 2005, just a year after his breakout album “The College Dropout,” 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 (for Jay-z and Alicia Keys, among others) 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, who carried a bottle of booze onto the VMAS red carpet, 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 behavior on tour, and two years later, revealed his bipolar diagnosis on his album “Ye.”
West dropped out of sight for months. He returned the following year with “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,” a retrospective of his own flaws.
The rave reviews of the record helped to more firmly establish his standing as a musical genius, but his behavioral reputation still couldn’t be salvaged. Though the VMAS moment quickly became a pop-culture punchline, for West — known to brood over perceived unfairness or disrespect — it remained deeply personal.
His behavior included tweeting “BILL COSBY INNOCENT !!!!!!!!!! ”; describing slavery as a “choice”; interrupting the 2015 Grammys, where he told Beck he should surrender his album-of-theyear trophy to Beyoncé; and endorsing President Donald Trump in their much-photographed Oval Office meeting last fall — a move that he acknowledged horrified liberal allies in the music business.
“if you feel something don’t let peer pressure manipulate you,” West tweeted.
Swift response
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.
Still a few months from winning her first Grammy for album of the year, Swift wasn’t yet a global pop megastar. But she had made an astonishing ascent in Nashville, proving young listeners had an appetite for country music, and impressing industry gatekeepers — who initially scoffed at a teen singer — by writing her own songs, which sold millions.
She was also a publicity savant, with an intuitive knack for doling out just enough personal disclosures to seem relatable yet remain intriguing. Her specialty was writing songs and sneaking coded references into her liner notes that indicated they were about real people, particularly ex-boyfriends and crushes.
Yet 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 in the silver dress with the microphone ripped from her hand, awash in public sympathy and affirmation. After all, playing the underdog had long been part of her story — the excluded middleschooler who channeled her hurt into songwriting, where she told stories as an outsider looking in. As she sang in “You Belong With Me”: “She’s cheer captain and I’m on the bleachers.”
“Taylor knows exactly how to manipulate a message,” said Elaine Lui, “The Social” and “etalk” TV personality who runs the website Laineygossip. Even if Swift isn’t the instigator of a dramatic situation, she added, “there’s this tension and conflict that permeates her work.”
In interviews after the 2009 VMAS, Swift insisted that she was a fan of West and had accepted his apology. But the next year, she appeared back at the show to introduce a new ballad called “Innocent.” The performance started with grainy footage of the Kanye incident, and the lyrics were steeped in faux-forgiveness and condescension: “It’s OK, life is a tough crowd / Thirtytwo and still growin’ up now / Who you are is not what you did.”
West closed the show, seeming to own all the criticism of the past year by performing the bombastic, vulgarity-filled “Runaway.” What was it like having both stars in attendance that night?
“Awkward,” was all Toffler would say.
West publicly complained that Swift “rode” his negative publicity for her own benefit. But then they had a friendly exchange at the 2011 Met Gala. But then West told The New York Times he had “no regrets” about his outburst. But then West and Swift were seen happily chatting at the 2015 Grammys.
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 completely 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 (expletive) famous.” The video featured naked look-alikes of Swift and other celebrities. She decried it as misogynistic “revenge porn.”
A bitter and 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.”
This rankled reality TV mogul Kim Kardashian West, Kanye West’s wife, who blasted Swift for playing the victim. She released a Snapchat recording of an amiable phone call that seemed to show West giving Swift a headsup about the song — never mind that he apparently said nothing about calling her a “bitch.”
Nonetheless, Kardashian branded Swift a “snake,” and much of the Internet followed suit. The controversy was a stark reminder that Swift and West’s careers would continue to be entangled. Swift released a statement that said she was being “falsely painted as a liar.”
“I would very much like to be excluded from this narrative, one I never asked to be a part of, since 2009,” she wrote.
But that simply wasn’t an option.
The backlash was a rare setback for Swift, typically a master of carefully controlling her image. She vanished from the spotlight and later called it her “lowest point.” When she returned in late 2017 with “Reputation,” she mockingly employed a snake motif in her first single’s music video. On tour, a gigantic serpent towered over the audience, and each concert ended with “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” — about a so-called friend who would “get you on the phone and mind-twist you.”