The long-standing feud between Taylor Swift and Kanye West has been discussed and written about at length at this point. However, in a new Rolling Stone cover story, Swift speaks about it with as much depth as she ever has, and got candid enough about everything to refer to Kanye as “two-faced.”
She said that when it comes to her famous phone call with Kanye regarding the lyrics of “Famous,” nobody at the time knew everything that went into it, saying, “The world didn’t understand the context and the events that led up to it. Because nothing ever just happens like that without some lead-up. Some events took place to cause me to be pissed off when he called me a b*tch. That was not just a singular event. Basically, I got really sick of the dynamic between he and I. And that wasn’t just based on what happened on that phone call and with that song — it was kind of a chain reaction of things.”
Swift then spoke about making nice with West following the stage-crashing incident at the 2009 VMAs: “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. 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 antagonizing me, I just want his approval.’ But that’s where I was. And so we’d go to dinner and stuff. And I was so happy, because he would say really nice things about my music. It just felt like I was healing some childhood rejection or something from when I was 19.”
.@taylorswift13 returns to our cover, giving one of the most revealing interviews of her career. She tells @hiattb her side of the last three years, from the backstory of that infamous phone call to her musical evolution and more https://t.co/okd6KysdUH pic.twitter.com/pllLe3cEVT
— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) September 18, 2019
When it came time for the 2015 VMAs, though, Swift says that Kanye manipulated her, saying, “He’s getting the Vanguard Award. He called me up beforehand — I didn’t illegally record it, so I can’t play it for you. 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. 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!'”
It was at this point that she realized Kanye was “two-faced,” saying, “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. 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 sh*t. And I was so upset. He wanted me to come talk to him after the event in his dressing room. I wouldn’t go. 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.'”
After the infamous phone call, Swift decided she was done trying to pretend that her relationship with Kanye was fine: “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. And I was like, ‘OK, good. We’re back on good terms.’ And then when I 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.'”
Read the full cover story here.
