hollywood billionaire

Chapter 397: Darkest Hour (Part )

Most people who care about pop music still remember this dramatic scene vividly.

As Taylor accepted the Moonman trophy on the Radio City Music Hall stage and prepared to give her acceptance speech for Best Female Video for "You Belong With Me" amid deafening cheers and applause from the crowd, Kanye quickly walked up the steps, grabbed the microphone, and delivered his now-infamous statement:

"Yo, Taylor, I'm so happy for you. I'll let you finish, but Beyoncé has one of the best videos ever!"

If you search the word "sad kitten" on Google, you can roughly see the expression of the poor girl who is three months away from turning 20 throughout the farce. MTV cut the camera to Beyoncé, who was open-mouthed and terrified, and then switched back to Taylor Swift, who was at a loss and had just taken the microphone back from Kanye West. The whole process lasted less than ten seconds, but the latter's speech time had quietly come to an end.

And even if there was still time to speak, Taylor would never pick up the microphone again.

After all, very few people can remain elegant, calm and composed after being slapped in the face with rude and reckless words and actions in front of 900 million viewers across the United States, and can still find a decent set of words to allow the award ceremony to continue smoothly.

Maybe someone in Hollywood can do it, but 19-year-old Taylor Swift hasn't developed such a heart of stone yet.

On the night of September 2009, 9, Taylor just stood there blankly, not saying a word amid the boos directed at Kanye by the audience, until the staff rushed onto the stage, snatched the microphone from her again, and escorted her off the stage.

What’s even more heartbreaking is that Taylor Swift later admitted that she even thought that the boos that flooded onto the stage were directed at her.

Whether you like this female singer and her works or not, whether you think that the personality she displays is so friendly and enthusiastic that it feels like a deliberate performance, whether you feel that her words in front of the camera are as delicate and hypocritical as porcelain... No matter what your opinion of Taylor Swift as an artist is, no one can deny one fact - that night, she was the perfect victim who did nothing wrong but brought upon herself a terrible disaster for no reason.

Yes, after the incident, everyone sympathized with Taylor. Kanye, who was drunk and out of control, was immediately asked to leave the award ceremony by MTV. After winning the MV of the Year Award, Beyoncé invited Taylor back to the stage so that she had the opportunity to finish her acceptance speech. Katy Perry, who gradually became Taylor's mortal enemy in the following years, cursed Kanye on Twitter, saying that he was like a big villain who stepped on a cat. Even the then US President bluntly called Kanye a "jerk".

The day after the awards ceremony, Kanye West, who had completely ignited the public opinion field, quickly apologized on Jay Leno's talk show...or in other words, according to the instructions of the public relations team and the record company, he came forward to carry out a certain degree of damage control.

"Today was really hard," Kanye said. "I was just dealing with the fact that I hurt somebody or ... I tried to take something away from a talented artist ... or anybody. I just want to help people and, you know, my whole life has been about giving and doing what I believe is right. And in that situation, I knew immediately that it was wrong for me to do that."

"This is not an entertainment phenomenon, but someone's emotions were trampled on by me, which is very... This is a very rude act, there is nothing else to say. I hope to apologize to her in person... Many celebrities don't have a break, and neither do I. One song follows another, one tour follows another... I'm just, ashamed that the hurt I suffered caused harm to others. My vision of what an awards show should be... I'm not trying to defend myself because I did make a mistake. After this incident, I need to take some time off and analyze how I will spend the rest of my life and how I will improve."

From the text, it is not difficult to see that the public relations team behind Kanye wrote a speech with a clear theme for him - admitting the harm caused to Taylor Swift, praising Taylor Swift's artistic achievements, apologizing to the public again, and expressing the willingness to resolve the matter with Taylor privately, so as to quickly put out the fire and reduce the attention of all sectors of society to this incident.

This PR strategy is not very skillful, but it is sincere and humble enough. If Kanye can meticulously complete the tasks assigned by his team, the scope and severity of this incident will undoubtedly be greatly reduced.

But if Kanye could really execute everything according to the intention of the manipulator behind the scenes without complaint, he would not be Kanye. Facing Jay Leno's question, Kanye answered hesitantly and reluctantly. Not only did he not say a formal "I'm sorry", but he also found several excuses for himself. The sentence "someone's emotions are being trampled by me" reveals his inner subtext.

Your emotions are something I can trample on at will, because I am a little higher up in the music food chain than you are. I am sorry for hurting you, but now that things have come to this, you have no better solution than to accept my apology.

Taylor Swift is young, but she is not stupid at all. Her parents and Big Machine Records CEO Scott Borchetta are all successful and savvy people. They can't fail to see Kanye West's hesitation to apologize publicly in front of the camera and his contempt for Taylor Swift.

Therefore, this rising country music star must make a strong response. After all, although the voices of support are overwhelming, no matter how many celebrities speak up for her, from that moment on, Taylor Swift's career will always be covered with a layer of playful and absurd filter.

She will always be the singer whose microphone was taken away by Kanye West, a kitten who screamed in pain when being stepped on, rather than a lioness that everyone fears.

This will become the most realistic view of Taylor Swift by the general public.

A cute, beautiful, delicate, but also fragile, soft, and powerless kitten who may be bullied at any time.

The United States is a primitive jungle that worships absolute power, and Hollywood is a meat grinder that believes in the law of social Darwin. People can look at the weak with sympathy, but will never deify them.

In other words, most girls wouldn't mind giving a comforting hug to the bullied nerd at school, but when night falls, they'll only knock on the door of the jocks' party.

Therefore, Taylor Swift must prove one thing to everyone - she is strong and free, will not be defeated, and will never be at the mercy of others again.

It deserves to be on the table, not just on the menu.

Since Kanye treats her as a dish that can be swallowed at will, Taylor will not mind using him as an appetizer to declare power and existence on the way to the shining star.

On September 2009, 9, Taylor Swift, a guest on the famous American daytime talk show "The View", revealed that Kanye West had not apologized to her privately as he claimed, reigniting the situation that had been gradually calmed down and pushing Kanye West back into the spotlight.

The show aired in the morning, and in the afternoon, Kanye West called Taylor Swift through their common label Universal Music and formally apologized to her. Although the bigwigs at Universal Music headquarters rarely intervene in disputes between its affiliated record companies, and the then CEO Doug Morris was also busy dealing with the mess he left in the streaming field, the drunken gaffe at the VMA awards ceremony has become a storm of public opinion affecting the two newcomers, and continuing to entangle will not benefit either party.

Just like Universal in 2024 was happy to see Kendrick Lamar and Drake's diss works dominate the charts, but when the former hung a "pedophile" sign around the latter's neck, it quickly stepped in to mediate and directly interrupted the dispute. In both incidents, Universal Music's attitude was very clear.

It's okay to do something to increase traffic, but it's not okay to kill each other.

So, the top executives from Santa Monica used a little bit of their skills to force Kanye West, whose position was not stable at the time, to bow his head and give in. In the following year, Kanye temporarily bid farewell to the music scene, while concentrating on expanding his influence in the fashion circle, and hiding in Hawaii to create and record his next album. As the victim of the incident, Taylor Swift was allowed to fight back on the stage. On November 2009, 11, she appeared as a guest of the week on NBC's most influential live variety show "Saturday Night Live".

The show had already been around for 35 years, and it was still going strong and timeless. The highest ratings in the 8.8th season even soared to %, making it a flagship show on NBC that was talked about throughout the United States and even the entire Western world. Such publicity resources were obviously not available to Big Machine, a small country music label from Nashville. Taylor Swift's SNL debut must have been a compensation for the resources given to her by Universal Music.

"You probably expected me to say something bad about Kanye on the show."

Taylor Swift sang during the musical intro of Saturday Night Live.

"Want to hear me tell you about how he ran up on stage and ruined my VMA opening."

"But there is actually nothing to say anymore, because everything has become a thing of the past."

"I have now found security to guard the stage to ensure that my SNL opening remarks can go smoothly."

Generally speaking, if this kind of teasing happened between two male rappers, it would probably set off another diss war with classic singles flying everywhere. But Taylor Swift is a country musician from Nashville after all, and Universal Music and even Jay-Z's Roc-A-Fella, considering their own interests, issued a strict silence order to Kanye West, forcing him to swallow this breath.

After Saturday Night Live, the two maintained a tacit peace for ten months. In September 2010, Kanye's new album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was completed and was about to be released. Although the first single "Power" did not perform well commercially, it fully demonstrated Kanye West's genius music creation ability with its master-level arrangement and atmosphere creation that transcended the times, and to a certain extent saved his precarious reputation after the VMA awards ceremony. In order to strike while the iron is hot and allow himself to welcome the release of the second single "Runaway" with a good public image, and the global release of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy on November 9, Kanye posted several tweets on Twitter on September 11, 22, and formally apologized to Taylor Swift for the first time after a full year.

"I'm sorry Taylor," he wrote. "We are both artists and the media and managers always try to come between us. She deserves this apology more than anyone. Thank you to [Twitter co-founders] Biz Stone and Evan Williams for creating a platform where we can communicate directly."

In a series of seemingly sincere tweets, Kanye also revealed that he wrote a song for Taylor. But before we heard it, Taylor released a song about Kanye first.

At the 2010 VMA awards ceremony, Taylor sang her new single "Innocent" barefoot to commemorate the first anniversary of Kanye's farce.

"Who you are does not depend on what you have done. You are still innocent."

“It doesn’t matter. Life is a ruthless audience.”

“At 32, I’m still growing.”

As the New York Times commented, "Innocent" is a clever combination of forgiveness and revenge, and is "an extremely shrewd insult disguised as a noble act." A 20-year-old girl teaches a 32-year-old adult man how to live a good life and how to continue to grow. Not to mention Kanye can't stand it, even a good man like Post Malone can't stand it, even if he is the initiator of this dispute.

So, on November 2010, 11, Kanye West publicly retracted his apology to Taylor. In an interview with Access Hollywood, Kanye claimed that Taylor Swift's "Fearless" did not deserve the Grammy Award for Album of the Year. In an exclusive interview with Minnesota KDWB radio, he went further and said that the drunken stage storming in 5 was not "arrogant" but "selfless." He also claimed that the event benefited Swift, saying that he helped her "be on 2009 magazine covers and gain the ability to sell 100 million albums in the first week."

On the Ellen Show, Kanye West's response was more comprehensive, and it showed his true attitude towards the matter. He said that after the VMA incident caused a sensation, he had to leave the United States and live in seclusion overseas for a while.

"I consider myself a culture warrior in a way. I know nobody wants that to be my job, so I'll never be on a stage like that again, I'll never be in an awards show audience again. But do I have mixed feelings about things that are... culturally significant, especially when that culture has been denied for years? I'm sorry, I still do. I can't lie to sell records."

By this time, Kanye West's motives and original intentions for rushing onto the stage under the influence of alcohol were already clear. He was not targeting Taylor Swift personally, but the white mainstream culture behind Taylor Swift that has long dominated. He was complaining about the "unfair treatment" of Beyoncé, and believed that the failure of "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)", which became a cultural phenomenon that year, to win the Best Female Singer Video Award was an oppression and denial of black culture and black women.

It is hard to blame Kanye West for having such an opinion. After all, it is a fact that black culture has long been ignored, denied and suppressed by mainstream society, and it is also a fact that his father is a "cultural warrior" who was a member of the Black Panther Party.

Although Ray West did not actively participate in Kanye West's growth, his father's values ​​have undoubtedly had a profound impact on Kanye. He opposed MTV's secret operation of equally distributing profits, just like he later exposed Universal Music's "unequal treaty" on the Internet and criticized the greed of Jewish executives, all for the world that should be fair in his heart.

As a wronged little girl, Taylor just wanted to get back what she had lost on the 2010 VMA stage. You slapped me in front of everyone, so I slapped you back. But in Kanye West's view, this was another suppression of him by "that class". Regardless of whether he gave in or remained silent, they would kill him and drive him to the bottom of the food chain again, so that he could return to "where black people should be."

When this thought was planted in Kanye's already sensitive and suspicious mind, everything that happened next was no longer important - after the 2010 VMA, Taylor Swift, who felt that the two had evened out, began to actively ease the relationship. She took the initiative to high-five Kanye West on the red carpet of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's charity dinner, appeared on the cover of a fashion magazine wearing clothes designed by Kanye, talked and laughed with him backstage at the 2015 Grammy Awards, and even personally presented Kanye West with the most important "Michael Jackson Vanguard Music Award" at the VMA awards ceremony of the same year.

"To all the other winners, I'm so happy for you. I'll let you finish your speeches, but Kanye West has had one of the best careers ever!"

Taylor Swift wanted to prove to everyone that she had completely let go of the feud by imitating Kanye West's humorous way, but she seemed to have forgotten to ask Kanye West's true thoughts. After the Grammy Awards, Kanye West told host Ryan Seacrest: "She wants to go into the studio to work together, and we will definitely go. I am not elitist in music, and I will not discriminate against anyone."

Who is the elite, and who is the one “originally” discriminated against by him?

"When I go to a baseball game and 60,000 people boo me, I think about what I would do if I had to do it again. Would I wear a leather shirt? Would I drink half a bottle of Hennessy and give the rest to the crowd? If I had a daughter, would I go up on stage and grab the microphone from someone?"

When accepting the Vanguard Music Award, this sincere and touching, yet somewhat aimless and confusing speech best reflects Kanye's mentality at the time.

“That’s the paradox of things: I was really fighting for artists, but in that war I was somehow being disrespectful to some other artists. I didn’t know how to say the right, perfect thing.”

"I sat at the Grammys and saw Justin Timberlake and Cee Lo lose. Gnarls Barkley and the FutureSex/LoveSounds album lost. I don't mean to embarrass you, but I saw tears in that man's eyes. He should have won Album of the Year. How do you explain that we, as the people who entertain the public that night, are confined to this little box? They can talk nonsense and make up rumors all they want, but I feel like I died for artists to be able to speak out after they become famous."

Cee Lo Green is black, and Gnarls Barkely is a soul music duo composed of Cee Lo and Danger Mouse. Although Justin Timberlake is white, his FutureSex/LoveSounds was produced entirely by black producer Timbaland, and the entire album is full of strong R&B, funk and other black music elements. Here, Kanye West once again defended his disqualified behavior at the 2009 VMA Awards Ceremony - he is still a cultural warrior, a warrior who is willing to die to defend black culture.

"I'm not a politician, guys. But look at that screen. Do you know how many times MTV played that clip of me and Taylor over and over? It got them higher ratings. Do you know how many times they said before this awards show that Taylor would give me the award in person? Because it got them higher ratings. Listen to the kids, guys!"

"I am confident and I believe in myself. We are the millennial generation, brothers, and we have a brand new state of mind. We will not use commercial brands to control our next generation, and we will not instill inferiority and hatred in our children. We will teach our children that they can achieve great things in the vast world. We can teach our children to have the courage to stand up for themselves. If my grandfather were still here now, he would never let me back down."

Although Kanye West did not specify who the child in his words was, I believe most people can guess that he is still speaking for his community from the perspective of the oppressed African American community. In 2015, the Black Lives Matter movement intensified, and American society became unprecedentedly divided due to the ongoing racial conflicts. Under such circumstances, the flame of "culture warrior" in Kanye West's heart was rekindled. In addition to publicly announcing that he would run for president in 2020, Kanye was also ready to spread the truth he knew to the confused masses.

He wants to make the public realize that it has always been the Jews who control the media and entertainment industries. They play him like a toy and "blacklist anyone who opposes their agenda." He wants to fight against this phenomenon and prevent Jewish wealth from continuing to distort, belittle and falsify black culture and even American popular culture as a whole.

The first person he wanted to target was Taylor Swift, who had become the first artist in history to have three albums sell over a million copies in the first week through her album "1989" and was just one step away from becoming the industry's king.

In his view, Taylor was the next spokesperson chosen by Jewish forces.

A target that is within reach, a target that must be destroyed.

So, regardless of whether he and Taylor Swift have reconciled, regardless of whether Taylor Swift posted a photo with flowers on Instagram with a bright smile, claiming that these were flowers given to her by Kanye, and even used the hashtag #KenTay2020, humorously announcing that she would participate in the presidential election with Kanye West, regardless of whether fans are already looking forward to their legendary upcoming collaboration single... Kanye West put aside all these harmonious appearances and held a live event at Madison Square Garden on February 2016, 2 to warm up his new album "The Life of Pablo" and fashion brand Season Three.

Tickets for the event were not sold to the public, but many big names including Anna Wintour, the Kardashian sisters and Young Thug came to the scene to celebrate for him. At this time, Kanye West, with his dual success in the music and fashion circles, has become the hottest new billionaire in North America and is sprinting towards $1 billion.

Therefore, for ordinary people, they can only make an appointment to watch the live broadcast on the Tidal platform. The entire live broadcast experience is a complete disaster. Due to the huge amount of users trying to watch at the same time, the traffic is huge and the live broadcast often stalls.

But in the end, none of these small experiences mattered. The biggest takeaway from the night wasn’t new clothes, new songs on an album, or Tidal’s massive failure in live streaming — it was four lines about Taylor Swift.

In a new song called "Famous," Kanye West sings:
“I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex.

Why? I made that bitch famous.

God damn,

I made that bitch famous. ”

(End of this chapter)