Consequence has said that Kanye West was worried his career was over after his infamous interruption of Taylor Swift at the 2009 MTV VMAs.
The incident transpired after Swift’s “You Belong With Me” music video beat out Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” visual, among others, for the Best Female Video award.
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The Fearless singer was in the midst of accepting her award when Ye stormed the stage and snatched the microphone from her hand in what Rolling Stone recently called one of the “worst decisions in music history.”
“Yo, Taylor, I’m really happy for you,” he said while crashing Swift’s acceptance speech. “I’ma let you finish, but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time! One of the best videos of all time!”
According to Billboard, Kanye was seen passing around a bottle of Hennessy throughout the evening as he attended the award show with his girlfriend at the time, Amber Rose.
Following massive backlash from the public — including then-President Barack Obama, who labeled him a “jackass” — West fled to Hawaii, where he crafted his magnum opus My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy in 2010.
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In an exclusive interview with HipHopDX, Consequence shed light on Kanye’s mindset during this time, revealing that the rapper was extremely worried that his interruption had cost him his career.
He also said Ye started his weekly G.O.O.D. Fridays drops — which preceded the release of MBDTF and boasted collaborations with JAY-Z, Rick Ross, Pusha T and more — in an effort to rehabilitate his image.
“To be 100 percent honest, ‘Power’ is ‘Power’ now, but that was the first record off that cycle and ‘Power’ was kinda the first time it didn’t go all the way,” Cons said. “It didn’t do what ‘Gold Digger’ did, it didn’t do what ‘Can’t Tell Me Nothing’ did, and it didn’t do what ‘Stronger’ did.
“So it was kinda like, ‘What we gonna do?’ We ain’t got no out-the-gates smash. We got a single and they playing it, but it wasn’t that one. That’s how G.O.O.D. Fridays come about.”
He continued: “It doesn’t eradicate the Taylor Swift incident. It’s not big enough to K.O. that. Brands ain’t gonna forget that, touring ain’t gonna forget that, so forth and so on. So which put Kanye in a corner, and he came out flying with G.O.O.D. Fridays.”
Kanye himself previously admitted that the Taylor Swift incident forced him to re-evaluate some things, and that it was a huge contributing factor to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.
“After the infamous Taylor Swift moment, I sort of did a little self-exile, just to get away from paparazzi and to have people not, you know, just fucking with me constantly,” he recalled at a footwear event in 2020. “I went to Hawaii and took all the creative energy that I wanted to express and we put it into an album called My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.
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“We’d visit Stockholm on the weekends. That was in my single days. It was fun. It wasn’t too bad. It wasn’t as miserable an experience as some might think. My exile was pretty fun and stuff. ‘What does Kanye do when he pissed every person off on the planet?’ He goes Stockholm and dances.”
Since its release on November 22, 2010, MBDTF has been hailed as a masterpiece and received nearly perfect reviews — including a 4.5 out 5 score from HipHopDX.
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The star-studded, chart-topping project was deemed the Best Album of the Decade by Billboard in 2019 and has since been certified triple platinum.
