Taylor Swift Calls Kanye West 'Two-Faced' In New Rolling Stone Interview
Taylor Swift is revisiting her long-running feud with Kanye West. During an interview for the October issue of Rolling Stone, the pop superstar recalls trying to mend her relationship with the rapper following the now infamous 2009 MTV Video Music Awards.
“I started to feel like we reconnected, which felt great for me — because all I ever wanted my whole career after that thing happened in 2009 was for him to respect me,” Swift tells the magazine. “When someone doesn’t respect you so loudly and says you literally don’t deserve to be here — I just so badly wanted that respect from him, and I hate that about myself, that I was like, ‘This guy who’s antagonising me, I just want his approval.'”
Six years later, West asked Swift to present him with the Video Vanguard Award at the 2015 VMAs. “He called me up beforehand — I didn’t illegally record it, so I can’t play it for you,” she says. “But he called me up, maybe a week or so before the event, and we had maybe over an hourlong conversation, and he’s like, ‘I really, really would like for you to present this Vanguard Award to me, this would mean so much to me,’ and went into all the reasons why it means so much, because he can be so sweet. He can be the sweetest. And I was so stoked that he asked me that.”
But when ‘Ye got on stage to accept the award, she wasn’t prepared for what he would say. “And so I wrote this speech up, and then we get to the VMAs and I make this speech and he screams, ‘MTV got Taylor Swift up here to present me this award for ratings!'” RS points out that his exact words were, “You know how many times they announced Taylor was going to give me the award ’cause it got them more ratings?”
The comments didn’t go over well with Swift. “And I’m standing in the audience with my arm around his wife, and this chill ran through my body. I realized he is so two-faced,” she says. “That he wants to be nice to me behind the scenes, but then he wants to look cool, get up in front of everyone and talk shit. And I was so upset. He wanted me to come talk to him after the event in his dressing room. I wouldn’t go.”
But after Kanye apologised, she decided to move past it. “So then he sent this big, big thing of flowers the next day to apologize. And I was like, ‘You know what? I really don’t want us to be on bad terms again. So whatever, I’m just going to move past this.’ So when he gets on the phone with me, and I was so touched that he would be respectful and, like, tell me about this one line in the song.”
On his 2016 song “Famous,” Kanye raps the infamous line, “To all my southside ni**as that know me best, I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex.”
Despite Kim Kardashian posting footage of the phone call on Snapchat, Swift claims West never told her that he was going to use the line, “I made that bitch famous.” “Where in the video of Kanye telling me he was going to call me ‘that bitch’ in his song? It doesn’t exist because it never happened. You don’t get to control someone’s emotional response to being called ‘that bitch’ in front of the entire world,” she wrote on Instagram at the time. “Of course I wanted to like the song. I wanted to believe Kanye when he told me that I would love the song.”
If you want to be on bad terms, let’s be on bad terms, but just be real about it,'” she said, going on to compare her drama with West to his recent falling-out with Drake, where Pusha T dissed Drake and revealed the identity of the Toronto superstar’s son, based on knowledge Kanye handed to Pusha.
“And then he literally did the same thing to Drake,” she said. “He gravely affected the trajectory of Drake’s family and their lives. It’s the same thing. Getting close to you, earning your trust, detonating you. I really don’t want to talk about it anymore because I get worked up, and I don’t want to just talk about negative shit all day, but it’s the same thing.”