It has been 11 years since Kanye West jumped onstage and demanded that Taylor Swift‘s Best Female Video award at the MTV VMAs go to Beyoncé instead. He now claims that God was the one who had him seated in the front row, which gave him immediate access to act upon his impulse to interrupt Taylor’s big moment on live TV. He also claims that he’d never heard of Taylor, and that it was outrageous how she could have beat Bey and her “Single Ladies” video.
“Right now, God is giving me the information,” Kanye, 43, told Nick Cannon on the Sept. 1 Cannon’s Class podcast. “If God ain’t want me to run on stage and say Beyoncé had the best video, he wouldn’t have sat me in the front row. I would’ve been sitting in the back.” Clearly that wouldn’t have happened, as Kanye was one of the biggest stars in music at the time, and the telecast’s producers always put the top tier talent in the front row. You can watch Ye’s comments starting at the 9:36 mark in the above video.
Kanye claimed he didn’t know who Taylor was as she was onstage accepting the award for her music video, “You Belong To Me.” “They wouldn’t have made it the first award. It’s so ridiculous of an idea because, I had never heard of this person [Taylor] before, and ‘Single Ladies’ is, like, one of the greatest videos of all time,” Kanye explained.
There was also the fact that he was swigging from a bottle of Hennessy from the red carpet on through to the awards telecast. But he claims that his presence was a “set-up.” “And I was only drinking Hennessy because I didn’t want to go to the awards show because it was a set-up,” Kanye recalled to Nick. Wait, he just said God wanted him there in the front row to be Beyonce’s defender! Which one is it Ye?
Taylor, 30, documented how shocked she was at that infamous moment in her career via a diary entry at the time. She shared it in Aug. 2019, along with other diary recollections that came with the deluxe editions of her album Lover. Taylor began, “Ahh… the things that can change in a week. If you had told me that one of the biggest stars in music was going to jump on stage and announce that he thought I shouldn’t have won on live television, I would’ve said, ‘That stuff doesn’t really happen in real life,'” she wrote, adding, “Well…apparently…It does.” With a few brief periods of peace, two artists have been feuding ever since.