“I’mma let you finish,” Kanye West said to Taylor Swift on Sept. 13, 2009, and the world hasn’t been the same since. The interruption has become one, if not the iconic moment of the MTV Video Music Awards. Though Kanye was trying to defend Beyonce after Taylor defeated her to win the award, his actions actually left Bey feeling “sad” and embarrassed. “I walk behind the stage,” Van Toffler, former president of Viacom (who owns MTV) told Billboard when discussing the moment’s 10th anniversary, “and sure enough, there is Beyoncé and her dad, and she is crying. She was like, ‘I didn’t know this was going to happen, I feel so bad for her.’”
Beyonce wasn’t the only one caught up in her feelings over Ye’s stunt. “The crowd in Radio City just turned on [Kanye],” James Montgomery, former senior correspondent/on-air talent for MTV News, told Billboard. “People were booing and hissing. During the commercial break, he went back down to his seat and Pink walked up to him and got in his face. I wasn’t close enough to hear the conversation, but she was pointing in his face and nodding her head back and forth, and giving him her two cents about how f*cked up this was and then stormed off.”
Thankfully, Van Toffler and the rest of the VMA producers managed to turn lemons into lemonade. After seeing Beyonce in tears, “that’s when it started to click in my head, and maybe hers, about potentially having the whole arc play out in that one night,” Toffler said. “[A]t some point I let her know that she was probably going to be up on the podium at the end of the show for an award. And wouldn’t it be nice to have Taylor come up and have her moment then? I had to indicate to her that she needed to stay, and perhaps this is a way to have this come full circle and let [Taylor] have her moment. I would normally not say anything, but I had two crying artists.”
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The rest is history. When Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” won the award for Video Of The Year, she called Taylor to come out on stage and finish her speech. “There was a lot of begging, but fortunately [Taylor] agreed to stay, and Beyoncé agreed to do a wonderfully gracious thing,” Toffler said. “So the Shakespearean arc played out over the course of the evening.”
If only that was the end of the story. She performed “Innocent” at the 2010 MTV VMAs, a song all about the prior year’s interruption. The two seemed to bury the hatched in 2015, with Taylor even presenting Kanye the Video Vanguard Award at that year’s MTV VMAs. The bad blood came roaring back in 2016 when Kanye, in his song “Famous,” said “I feel like me, and Taylor might still have sex / Why? I made that bitch famous.” The back and forth between Taylor and Kanye/Kim Kardashian gave birth to the “Reputation”-era Taylor, but that Taylor seems dead.
Now, Taylor is back with a new album, Lover, and she’s back at the MTV VMAs. She’s up for 12 awards at the 2019 edition, airing on Aug. 26. She’s also going to perform. Kanye is also nominated – he’s up for Best Art Direction for his “I Love It” video. Another artist nominated for that Moonperson? Taylor Swift. Uh-oh.