Taylor Swift and Kanye West have presided over one of the most tiresome, drawn-out feuds in the entire entertainment industry, and though they’ve yet to bury the hatchet, it might be worth looking over the timeline to determine who was really at fault here. (Hint: It was the musician known mostly as a hip-hop artist.)
It should be noted that Taylor herself has never felt particularly inclined to dig out old grievances, famously asking the public to “exclude” her from this narrative, one that she “never asked to be a part of since 2009.” Back then, an alleged phone call between Taylor and Kanye (who currently goes under the moniker of Ye) made Miss Americana out to be the ultimate villain in this drama, but since then, new evidence has proven to everyone that maybe Ye and his former wife Kim Kardashian, not to mention most media outlets, owe Taylor an apology.
This article is somewhat written to that effect, trying to clear out any conceivable misconceptions about the whole scandal by giving you the facts straight and simple. So, *sighs*, let’s get into the thick of it once, and hopefully, for all.
Ye interrupts Taylor during her acceptance speech at the MTV Awards, 2009
It all started when Ye, for reasons that elude all notions of common sense, interrupted Taylor during her acceptance speech for Best Female Video at the 2009 MTV Awards. “Yo, Taylor, I’m really happy for you, and I’m gonna let you finish,” he said to the crowd after taking the microphone away from Taylor. “But Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time!”
This unleashed a maelstrom of controversy over the following days, so much so that the ceremony itself was mostly overlooked. A baffled Taylor left the stage and told reporters: “I was standing on stage and I was really excited because I’d just won the award and then I was really excited because Kanye West was on stage … And then I wasn’t excited anymore after that.”
As you’d expect, almost everyone condemned Ye for this extremely rude interlude, and even he seemed to agree that it was uncalled for. “It’s actually someone’s emotions that I stepped on,” he told Ellen DeGeneres later that year. “It was very, it was rude, period. I’d like to be able to apologize to her in person.”
Taylor even told the media that Kanye personally called her to apologize. But of course, it would hardly end there.
Taylor writes and performs the song “Innocent” which is allegedly about Ye
Taylor wrote a song for his 2010 album Speak Now which allegedly talks about Ye and the whole MTV affair. In it, she says “Who you are is not where you’ve been, you’re still an innocent. It’s okay, life is a tough crowd, 32 and still growing up now.” I mean, it doesn’t get any clearer than that. Apparently, Ye didn’t much appreciate the song, because a few years later, in an interview with the New York Times, he took back his apology, and said that he regrets nothing.
“I don’t have one regret. If anyone’s reading this waiting for some type of full-on, flat apology for anything, they should just stop reading right now. I have, as a human being, fallen to peer pressure.”
Possibility of reconciliation at the 2015 MTV Awards
For the next two years, Taylor and Ye addressed each other in different interviews in an overall amenable light. She then presented him with MTV’s Video Vanguard Award in 2015 with a friendly speech. Ye returned the favor by sending her flowers. Flash forward to February 2016, when it all went to hell again.
Ye debuts “Famous” which featured an inappropriate dig at Taylor in 2016
West released “Famous” in February of 2016. One of the lines in this song misogynistically implies that Ye made Taylor famous and even calls her the B word. “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex. Why? I made that b*tch famous.” Backlash followed from Taylor’s fanbase and the two musician’s peers, and during her acceptance speech at the Grammy that year, Taylor took some direct shots at Ye.
“I want to 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,” a part of her acceptance speech read.
In June 2016, Kim Kardashian claimed that Taylor knew about the “Famous” lyric from the get-go
Kim Kardashian became involved in the drama in June of 2016, when she claimed in a profile with GQ that Taylor knew about the lyrics before the song came out. “She totally knew that that was coming out,” Kardashian alleged. “She wanted to all of a sudden act like she didn’t. I swear, my husband gets so much sh** for things [when] he really was doing proper protocol and even called to get it approved.”
Taylor’s spokesperson released a statement denying the accusation, which compelled Kim to release video footage of Ye’s call with Taylor, but not before her husband released the “Famous” music video which featured a naked sculpture of Taylor lying next to him, further exacerbating the controversy.
On July 17, 2016, Kim released the trimmed video footage of Kanye and Taylor’s call
In an attempt to further defend her husband’s honor, Kim Kardashian released a Snapchat of his conversation with Taylor. It would be years later when we learned the truth about this conversation, but in that time, Kim made it seem like Taylor had already given his approval and later tried to backtrack to make herself the “victim.”
“I never would’ve expected you to like tell me about a line in your song,” Swift is heard saying. “I mean, I don’t think anybody would listen to that and be like, ‘Oh, that’s a real diss.’ You gotta tell the story that way that it happened to you and the way you experienced it. If people ask me about it, look, I think it would be great for me to be like, ‘He called me and told me before it came out … Joke’s on you, guys. We’re fine.’”
The hashtag #KimExposedTaylorParty and #TaylorSwiftIsOverParty started trending on the internet, with thousands of fans flooding Taylor’s social media pages and using the snake emoji to call her out. (That would later be turned into a symbol for Taylor’s resurgence album, reputation.)
Taylor responds to the allegations with a lengthy post on Instagram
Swift was quick to respond to the allegations in a lengthy Instagram post, saying that Kanye never told her he was going to call her “that b***h” in the song. “It doesn’t exist because it never happened,” she wrote. “You don’t get to control someone’s emotional response to being called ‘that b***h’ in front of the entire world.”
By then, of course, it was a little too late. Taylor chronicles this period of her life in the Miss Americana documentary, explaining how the media and the public compelled her to step away and essentially hide herself for a year.
Swift makes a comeback with reputation in 2017
Taylor made an epic return to the music scene with the November 2017 release of reputation. In a series of songs like “Look What You Made Me Do” and “This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things,” she leans into the scenario of being a manipulative snake and owning the public scrutiny, so to speak. Taylor doesn’t appear for any interviews, or even run a promo campaign in the media for reputation, but it still manages to become a huge success. In a series of interviews following the release of reputation, one in March 2019, Taylor seemingly shakes off the drama.
Taylor gets candid about the Ye drama in September 2019, says that “Famous” was the last straw
Swift opened up about the drama in a Rolling Stone interview and said that she tried to bury the hatchet with Ye, but when she heard the song, “I was like, ‘I’m done with this. If you want to be on bad terms, let’s be on bad terms, but just be real about it.’”
The full phone call between Taylor and Ye leaks in March 2020, completely upending the narrative
In the full video, leaked on March 20, 2020, a nervous Taylor can be heard asking if the lyrics are going to be mean. Ye admits that even his wife thinks they’re “too crazy” and then continues to say: “So it says, ‘To all my Southside n— that know me best, I feel like Taylor Swift might owe me sex.” Taylor laughs and says “That’s not mean,” and further expresses relief that the lyrics aren’t about her being a “stupid dumb b***h.” As you’d expect, this completely changed the narrative and proved that Taylor was speaking the truth all along, though Kim claimed via a tweet that “nobody ever denied the word ‘b***h’ was used without her permission.”
The rest, as they say, is history, though in her recent profile in Time magazine, where she was hailed 2023’s Person of the Year, Swift said the drama felt like a “career death” at some point.
“Make no mistake — my career was taken away from me. You have a fully manufactured frame job, in an illegally recorded phone call, which Kim Kardashian edited and then put out to say to everyone that I was a liar,” she explained. “That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before. I moved to a foreign country. I didn’t leave a rental house for a year. I was afraid to get on phone calls. I pushed away most people in my life because I didn’t trust anyone anymore. I went down really, really hard.”
Well, Taylor Swift is now arguably the most popular person on the planet, with a recent music tour that shattered all records and went down as the highest-grossing concert in history. So, I guess all’s well that ends well, eh?
