Ten years That changed The conversation

‘If you had told me that one of the biggest stars in music was going to jump on stage and announce that he thought I shouldn’t have won on live

television, I would’ve said, “That stuff

doesn’t really happen,”’ wrote Taylor Swift in her diary 10 years ago. ‘Well, apparently… it does.’

The excerpt, recently released with her new album Lover, underplays a now-legendary moment of the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, Swift’s career, and modern pop culture. As Swift was midway through her acceptance speech for Best Female Video for You Belong With Me, Kanye West stormed the stage, seized her mic, and told the world that Beyoncé should have won for Single Ladies

– ‘one of the best videos of all time’. At the time, it was hard to overstate the moment’s impact.

Rob Ledonne, a New York-based writer who was then a production assistant on the VMAS, was backstage. ‘I’d no idea what happened until I got calls and texts about how they couldn’t believe that Kanye did that,’ he says. ‘So much money, time and work was spent putting together this production. But everyone was talking about an unscripted moment on stage that wound up taking over the show.’

Today, celebrities are a mainstream topic of debate, and even academic analysis, but West vs

Swift was one of the first cultural flashpoints that everyone had a take

on, with the majority aligned behind Swift. Kelly Clarkson speculated that West had not been hugged enough as a child; Katy Perry said it was as if he had ‘stepped on a kitten’. Donald Trump, then host of The Apprentice,

called for a boycott of West, more recently his political ally, while a tape of President Barack Obama calling

West a ‘jackass’ off the record was

shared by an ABC reporter.

It was also an early demonstration of social media’s power to corral conversation. Twitter was still in its infancy, but West’s grandiose

opening gambit (‘I’mma let you finish,

but…’) and quick shrug (immortalised online as ¯\_( )_/¯) were among the

first memes. ‘That one moment kicked off what’s become a decade

of media narratives,’ says Ledonne.

Though both celebrities were already famous, after the VMAS they became household names, with personas – West, the unpredictable provocateur; Swift the hapless victim – that stuck (and which some commentators criticised as racially charged). The incident also linked them to each other. West was disingenuous when seven years later he took credit for Swift’s career in his song Famous; but still, Google searches for Taylor’s name have never surpassed the spike of September 2009.

While West has said, ‘That night when I went on stage was the beginning of the end of my life,’ it helped push him to make what is often thought of as his masterpiece,

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.

As for Swift, she may indeed have claimed that she would ‘very much like to be excluded from this narrative’, but her recent albums show it has shaped her image and art too. In 2013, an interviewer visiting her Nashville apartment noticed that the image of West crashing her stage was hanging in a gilded frame with a handwritten caption: ‘Life is full of little interruptions.’