Kanye West’s renewed interest in religion has led him down some pretty odd roads. He recently admitted on Nick Cannon’s podcast that he spent around $50 million on his Sunday Services around the nation, he compared Christians to Michael Jordan during an interview with Vogue last December, he infamously requested his collaborators refrain from sex during the recording process, he brainstormed a “clean” version of TikTok called “Jesus Tok,” and he made whatever this was supposed to be.
But during that same interview with Nick Cannon, he also credited the Man Upstairs with one of his more infamous missteps: His 2009 VMAs outburst in which he crashed the stage during Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech for winning Best Female Video to snatch the mic and declare Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” one of the “best videos of all time.” As Kanye told Cannon:
If God didn’t want me to run on stage and say, “Beyonce had the best video,” He wouldn’t have sat me in the front row. I would’ve been sitting in the back. He wouldn’t have made it the first award. And [He] wouldn’t have made it so ridiculous of an idea ’cause I had never heard of this person before that night. And “Single Ladies” is, like, one of the greatest videos of all time… And I was only drinking Hennessy because I didn’t want to go to the awards show ’cause it was a set-up!
It’s one hell of an explanation — pun most definitely intended, thank you very much. While he does provide a little more context — certainly, he wasn’t the only person who’d never heard Swift’s “You Belong with Me” before then — we’re going to file this one under “Kanye’s semi-facetious hyperbolic statements that will inevitably be taken wildly out of context.” That said, it’s a moment that helped launch both Swift and West into an entirely new tier of superstardom and at least one of them is actually trying to save this country so maybe it really is God’s plan, and He just works in mysterious ways.
