Last January Kanye West called Taylor Swift to ask whether she'd mind if he wrote a song in which he referenced having sex with her. After hearing the lyrics, she told him that they ”didn't matter" to her. But she had an idea.
”If people ask me about it," she said, her voice picking up with excitement, ”I think it'd be great for me to be like, ‘Look, he called me about the line before it came out. Joke's on you guys! We're fine.'" Swift told West she'd be doing just that on the Grammys red carpet, weeks after the song's release.
It was released, however, to the public's immediate revulsion. The lyrics were described as sexist, misogynistic, and deeply offensive, with many West fans threatening to boycott him. He attempted to explain that Swift was aware of its content, but she didn't enact her plan. Instead Swift released a statement publicly decrying the song as ”misogynistic", claiming she'd cautioned West against releasing it.
And at the Grammys, Swift took to the stage to accept her award for Album of the Year and made a passionate speech. ”To all the young women out there," Swift warned, ”there are going to be people along the way who will try to undercut your success, or take credit for your achievements." Then, looking directly down the lens of the camera, she said: ”Or your fame." She paused for several seconds, allowing her message to percolate.
Swift had witnessed the negative reaction to ”Famous" and reverted back to a well-practised posture: that of victim.
Swift's speech at the Grammys was arguably the catalyst for West's wife, Kim Kardashian, stepping in. Three months after the awards ceremony, she told GQ that she believed the speech was a deliberate attempt to ”diss" West after he'd done nothing but ”follow protocol". She went on to claim that not only had Swift ”totally approved" the lyrics in ”Famous", but that there was also video footage to prove it. Swift's official response to the interview concluded with the line: ”Taylor cannot understand why Kanye West and now Kim Kardashian will not leave her alone."
Two months after the interview, we saw Kim Kardashian sitting on a plush velvet couch, talking about it with her sister Kourtney as the Keeping Up With the Kardashians cameras rolled. ”You know I never talk shit about anyone publicly, especially in interviews," Kardashian told her sister. ”I just felt like I wanted to defend Kanye in it." Rolling her heavily lined eyes to the ceiling, she sighed, ”It was just another way for her to play the victim. It definitely got her a lot of attention last time."
As soon as the episode had aired, Kardashian took to Snapchat and posted 22 consecutive clips without context or captions. But neither were needed: It was immediately clear that Kardashian had leaked the footage of the phone call between West and Swift. It's crucial to note that it took another Caucasian woman – albeit, one with a complex history of proximity to and appropriation of black culture – to expose Swift. West could never have released this audio, because it would have been a continuation of the ”threatening" position he's occupied in their narrative – something Swift mentioned in her statement about the phone call.
In this statement, she asked to be ”excluded from the narrative, one that I have never asked to be a part of since 2009." Doing so harkened back to the moment she and West first met, at the MTV VMAs, where a young Swift clutched her award as West stormed the stage, took the microphone from her, and announced that Beyoncé should've won instead.
But West wasn't suggesting that Swift was undeserving – he was speaking out against systemic racism in the music industry, which consistently favours white artists. After the incident, West said: ”It's not about Kanye West. It's not about Taylor Swift. There's a lot of people in America that feel like they don't have a platform to stand up and express their closet racism."
He went on to say that the MTV judging panel gave Swift the award in a bid to fill the gap of ”young white pop star" left by Britney Spears in the wake of her breakdown, adding that he felt the need to ”get drunk" in order to cope with ”all the lies" in the ceremony.
The dominant reaction, however, was a reflection of what the world has been conditioned to see: the ”threat" of an ”angry" black man terrorising the ”innocent" white woman. Even their clothes reflected the racially fuelled victim/villain framework that would define the incident: The image of West, wearing dark shades and an entirely black outfit, accosting sweet Swift in her white and silver party dress, remains an iconic one.
The fallout for West was immediate. Public opinion spiralled so drastically that even the president branded him a ”jackass". Swift, on the other hand, was able to capitalise on the stereotype of the ”angry black man", an archetype that has been described as a ”figment of the white imagination", used to incarcerate and oppress black men. For Swift, it was PR gold. The incident may not have made her famous, as the lyrics in ”Famous" claim, but it certainly catapulted her into the mainstream consciousness.
Despite saying she wants to be ”excluded from the narrative", Swift has reminded the public of this same narrative countless times in jokes and speeches. She even has a framed photograph of the moment in her Nashville home.
In 2010 Swift wrote the song ”Innocent", in which she forgave West with the lyrics: ”32 and still growing up / Who you are is not what you did / You're still an innocent." Swift debuted the song with a performance at the MTV VMAs, opening with a literal replaying of her run-in with West from the previous year. But the scene was edited to entirely omit West's infamous line, and the final shot lingered on her overly pained face.
