According to Kanye West, he is just saying what everyone else is thinking when he says the things he does.
During a concert in the Philippines over the weekend, West did what he does best: unapologetically express himself—this time offering an explanation for his expressive nature.
“That night when I went onstage was the beginning of the end of my life. You know what night I’m talking about. When I just said what everybody else was thinking,” he went on to say. “So if I get in trouble for saying the truth, what’s being said the rest of the time?”
The night he speaks of is when he ambushed singer Taylor Swift on stage as she accepted the best female video award at the 2009 MTV Music Awards. The Chicago rapper declared that Beyonce had made “one of the best videos of all time. Of all time!” for her single, “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It).”
West struggled to get back into the good graces with the media and Taylor Swift, who he later reconciled with.
“I had to fight every day of my life, with the whole world turned against me, for saying out loud what everyone else felt,” he continued to say. “But that’s the job of an artist, of a true artist: not to be controlled by their finances, not to be controlled by perceptions, but only to be controlled by their truth.”
However, with the release of a new song titled, “Famous” off his number one album, “The Life of Pablo,” the reconciliation is perhaps on hold again. One of the lyrics stated: “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / Why? I made that [expletive] famous (God [expletive]), I made that [expletive] famous.”
According to West, he needed to say those words.
“In the spirit of Nina Simone, in the spirit of real artists, this is the song that broke the writer’s block for me because it’s something I wanted to say so bad that they told me I couldn’t say,” said the 38-year-old rapper.
