New York: It’s Taylor vs. Kanye, part 242, with a dash of Kim Kardashian West.
West’s famous wife stirred the pot of beef between Taylor Swift and Kanye West on Sunday, when on Snapchat, she posted video of a phone call between the rapper and pop superstar about his song Famous, in which he rapped: “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex, Why? I made that bitch famous.”
Upon its release on February 11, West was condemned by many for the line. He insisted that Swift had given her blessing to the lyric, but she denied ever hearing the lyric.
On Twitter on Sunday, Kardashian teased: “Do u guys follow me on snap chat? u really should “-)”
Then, she unleashed a series of Snapchat videos that threatened to break the internet.
On them, a smiling West calls Swift on speakerphone and tells her that he’s working on a song and wants to use the lyric: “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex,” which he reads out slowly.
In response, Swift is heard saying she worries about overexposure, but West says the lyric would be good exposure. In the end, she appears to give her blessing.
“It’s like a compliment,” she says. “I really appreciate you telling me about it, that’s really nice.”
“I just had a responsibility to you as a friend. Thanks for being so cool about it,” he responds.
Swift also is heard saying that it’s a tongue-in-cheek line anyway, and that she would let people know she knew about it in advance She also says, “I’m always going to respect you.”
But when the song came out, the entire line was: “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex, Why? I made that bitch famous.” It debuted at West’s Yeezy Season 3 fashion show at New York’s Madison Square Garden.
On February 12, her representative said that, instead, Swift “cautioned him” about releasing the song: “Kanye did not call for approval, but to ask Taylor to release his single Famous on her Twitter account. She declined and cautioned him about releasing a song with such a strong misogynistic message. Taylor was never made aware of the actual lyric, ‘I made that bitch famous’.
Swift’s younger brother Austin condemned the song by throwing his Yeezy sneakers in the rubbish on an Instagram video captioned “getting a head start on some spring cleaning. Here we go again”.
In an acceptance speech at the Grammys on February 15, Swift appeared to disavow more than the “I made that bitch famous” line: “I want to say to the young woman out there, there are going to be people along the way who try to undercut your success or take credit for your accomplishments or your fame.” That’s not exactly what Swift had told West she would do, according to the phone recordings, where it seemed she will defend him to the press.
“If people ask me about it, I think it would be great for me to be like, ‘Well he called me and told me the line before it came out. Joke’s on you guys; we’re fine’... You guys want to call this a feud, you want to call this throwing shade, but right after the song comes out I’m going to be on the Grammy red carpet and they’re going to ask me about it, and I’m going to be like, ‘he called me’.”
Many on social media took glee in the leaked audio recordings on Sunday, and suggested that it proved Swift had lied.
But in an Instagram post, Swift said that the audio actually proved that she had never approved the use of the world “bitch.”
“Where is 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.
“Of course I wanted to like the song. I wanted to believe Kanye when he told me that I would love the song. I wanted us to have a friendly relationship. He promised to play the song for me, but he never did. While I wanted to be supportive of Kanye on the phone call, you cannot ‘approve’ a song you haven’t heard. Being falsely painted as a liar when I was never given the full story or played any part of the song is character assassination.”
This is the latest chapter in a long feud between the pair that now dates back seven years, when West took the stage as a then 19-year-old Swift beat Beyonce for an MTV Video Music Award. West came on stage as Swift was accepting her award and said, “Yo Taylor, I’m really happy for you, I’mma let you finish, but Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time!”
The infamous moment — arguably what West is talking about in the lyric — cast the rapper as a villain, and perhaps knocked his image slightly; Swift, already a multiplatinum star, went on to more fame. The feud continued for years, but the pair made up last year, with West, Kardashian West and Swift publicly trading hugs and smiles in public.
More than anyone, it appears to be Kardashian West throwing the match to this pop-star feud, telling GQ in June, “[Swift] totally approved that. She totally knew that that was coming out. She wanted to all of a sudden act like she didn’t. I swear, my husband gets so much [expletive] for things [when] he really was doing proper protocol and even called to get it approved.”
Her GQ interview featured in an episode of her show, Keeping Up With The Kardashians, on Sunday night, when she also posted a not-so-subtle tweet: Two hours before releasing the Snapchats, she wrote, “Wait it’s legit National Snake Day?!?!?They have holidays for everybody, I mean everything these days!,” with dozens of snake emojis.
Swift’s social media accounts have been flooded with snake emoji comments recently, but over a separate feud — with her ex-boyfriend Calvin Harris.
In her Instagram post Sunday, Swift seemed as weary of the public battle as many in the public have become: “I would very much like to be excluded from this narrative, one that I have never asked to be a part of, since 2009”.
