When you think of infamous moments in pop culture, chances are Kanye West interrupting Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards comes to mind. West’s instantly meme-worthy words — “I’ll let you finish…” — still resonate 15 years after he declared Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” deserved the Moonman Award for best female song.
Later in the show, Queen Bey won video of the year and invited Swift back onstage to claim her moment in the sun.
A wide-eyed 19-year-old Swift wore an off-the-shoulder sequin Kaufmanfranco gown. She arrived on the red carpet in a horse-drawn carriage shaped like a pumpkin.
Until then, Swift was a country singer-songwriter making her transition to pop, cemented by the success of her second album, “Fearless,” which won album of the year at the Grammys and spawned hits like “Love Story” and “You Belong With Me.”
“Taylor often played the role of a damsel in distress or overlooked romantic interest using theatrical costuming,” writes Sarah Chapelle in “Taylor Swift Style,” which launches Oct. 8, a spin-off of her popular Instagram account of the same name.
With this year’s VMAs and anniversary approaching, can Swift make the biggest splash by releasing the long-awaited “Taylor version” of her revenge album against West, “Reputation,” to mark the occasion?
It’s no coincidence that several books about Swift — including Rolling Stone journalist Rob Sheffield’s “Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music” (Nov. 12), Nicole Pomarico’s “Long Live: The Definitive Guide to the Folklore and Fandom of Taylor Swift,” Kristie Frederick Daugherty’s “Invisible Strings: 113 Poets Respond to the Songs of Taylor Swift” (both Dec. 3) and a Hearst Home gift book (Oct. 1) — are coming out around the 15th anniversary of when West claims to have made her famous, based on the lyrics of his 2016 song “Famous.” The song’s viral video featured nude wax figures of Swift, West, his then-wife Kim Kardashian, Donald Trump and others in bed together. To paraphrase Sheffield in “Heartbreak Is the National Anthem,” West and Trump are just two of the “men who have chosen her and made it a personal quest.” Trump recently posted a fake presidential endorsement of the singer.
Ever since West's drunken decision to crash Swift's celebration that fateful night in 2009 catapulted her to a new level of fame (“Who won Best Female Video the year before Swift, or the year after?” Sheffield asks in the book), they have been continually, often unwittingly, intertwined in one way or another.
At the following year's MTV VMAs, Swift performed the song “Innocent,” in which she seemingly forgave West for ruining her moment and elevating her status simultaneously.
In 2015, it seemed like the two had buried the hatchet, and in an ironic twist, she presented her “friend” West with the Video Vanguard award at the VMAs. Swift was riding high on the success of her first pop album, “1989,” and by all accounts was overexposed. She said: NME Magazine in October 2015: “I think people might need a break from me.”
That breakup wouldn’t exactly be self-imposed: After West released “Famous,” Swift publicly disavowed the song. “I would very much like to be excluded from this narrative, one I never asked to be a part of, since 2009,” she responded on Instagram. Kardashian responded by posting on Snapchat edited snippets of a phone call between West and Swift in which he told Swift about the song’s content and she appeared to approve. (The full recording of that phone call leaked in early 2020 and largely backed up Swift’s claim that she knew nothing about the controversial “I made that b—— famous” line.) The public consensus quickly turned against her, and she went into exile to write “Reputation,” arguably her most vengeful album, replete with serpentine iconography, “versions” of herself that she would revisit in the “Anti-Hero” video and the Eras tour, and a questionable video for lead single “Look What You Made Me Do” that featured Swift making finger guns in a diamond-filled bathtub. (Kardashian had been robbed at gunpoint in Paris the previous year and abducted in a bathtub by her assailants.)
It's an aspect of Swift's personality and art that are inextricable, that Sheffield characterizes as “mean Taylor.”
“It’s one of the things about her that we don’t necessarily want to identify with, but a lot of us do,” he tells The Times. “It’s one of the many ways she goes to emotional extremes that listeners don’t necessarily relate to.”
From there, Swift bounced back stronger, embarking on a re-recording effort to regain ownership of her previous albums while also entering a period of peak creative output, releasing five original studio albums between 2018 and 2024, two of which received Grammys for Album of the Year (“Folklore” and “Midnights”), adding to her existing haul for “Fearless” and “1989” and making her the only artist to win that honor four times. She’s now reached dangerously similar levels of overexposure to 2015 with her record-breaking Eras tour, her latest Grammy wins, the release of “The Tortured Poets Department” double album earlier this year and her highly publicized relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce.
It stands to reason that “Reputation” remains the last album in her back catalog that warrants a “Taylor version.” One can’t help but assume that the woman who preserved A photo on her living room wall of her and West fighting — with a handwritten caption by her that reads “Life is full of little interruptions” — is saving her revenge anthems about West for the crystal anniversary. After all, it happened on the 13th, a day long established as significant in Swift’s life.
“The fact that he delayed the announcement of ‘Reputation’ as much as he did was an example of his playful and mischievous side,” Sheffield laughs.
Pomarico says we shouldn't be too quick to clown around, a term Pomarico refers to as looking too deeply into the abundant Easter eggs Swift leaves for fans in her lyrics, videos, suits and album notes; Swift concluded this latest practice run with “Reputation” — and assumes the anniversary will herald “Reputation (Taylor's Version).”
“I’ve been fooled so many times trying to predict when Reputation (Taylor’s Version) will be released that I don’t want to jinx anything by clowning around again,” he tells The Times. “But on the other hand, that’s part of the fun: even when you’re wrong, it’s more about the thrill of creating fan theories and waiting to see if they come true.”
Feeding into the narrative that she claimed she wanted to be excluded from is not to deny Swift's hard work. Swift was already prodigiously mining her personal life for art before West snatched that microphone out of her hand 15 years ago and likely would have achieved a similar level of fame with or without West. In fact, her last five post-“Reputation” albums have had nothing to do with West. (Aside from her recent, supposedly offensive anti-Kardashian song “thanK you aIMee” – Recently renamed “Thanks aimEe” [capitalizing YE instead of KIM] in response to the release of West’s album “Vultures 2.”)
“Should anyone judge her for the way she chooses to process that experience through her music?” Pomarico asks.
The release of her most anticipated re-recording (her self-titled debut is still to come) will be the ultimate refutation of that fateful moment. As she announced when “Reputation” was first released: “There will be no more explanations. There will only be reputation.”
