Kanye West has revealed the reason behind his infamous stunt at the MTV VMAs in 2009 where he crashed the stage in the middle of Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech.
Speaking on Nick Cannon’s podcast Cannon’s Class, Kanye also opened up about his 2016 hospitalisation, his 2020 presidential campaign and the famous VMAs moment that went down in pop culture history.
“Right now, God is giving me the information,” he said. “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.”
ICYMI, in 2009 a teenaged Taylor Swift accepted her award for winning Best Female Video for ‘You Belong With Me’ when West – bottle of Hennessy in hand – stormed the stage and interrupted the ‘Folklore’ singer’s speech telling Taylor and the crowd, “Yo, Taylor, I’m really happy for you, I’mma let you finish.”
“Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time! One of the best videos of all time!” he said of her ‘Single Ladies’ clip, as Queen B watched on from the crowd, clearly mortified.
Doubling down on the claim in the interview, ‘Ye said, “It wouldn’t have made it so ridiculous of an idea because I had never heard of this person before. And ‘Single Ladies’ is, like, one of the greatest videos of all time.”
He added, “I was only drinking Hennessy because I didn’t want to go to the awards show because it was a set-up.”
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Elsewhere in the interview, the ‘Famous’ rapper revealed the hefty cost of promoting his elaborate Sunday Service, which Kanye said he paid for with his Yeezy budget.
“I spent every dime that I have for marketing from Yeezy on Sunday Service,” West claimed.
“Every dollar I had. I spent $50 million ($AU68 million) last year on Sunday Service if you add up the operas, if you add up the flights. It was 120 people going to Jamaica.”
“The Yeezys, they were selling themselves. So instead of paying for ads, I invested it in the church. I invested in spreading the gospel,” he said.
