Kanye West says God wanted him to interrupt Taylor Swift at the VMAs.
Eleven years ago this month, Kanye West hopped on the VMA stage in one of the most infamous moments in awards ceremony history. While Taylor Swift accepted the Best Female Video award for “You Belong With Me”, West ran to the stage to let the world know who he thought the real winner was, Beyonce. The moment sparked plenty of controversy and memes, but recently on the “Cannon’s Class” podcast, the rap maven admitted that God told him to do it.
“God has a calling on all of us and he uses us in different ways. Right now, God is giving me the information and he ain’t give me no other information, so that means he wants me to say this now. If God didn’t want me to run onstage and say, ‘Beyoncé had the best video,’ he wouldn’t have sat me in the front row,” Kanye West told host Nick Cannon. “I would’ve been sitting in the back. He wouldn’t have made it the first award. And wouldn’t have made it so ridiculous of an idea ’cause I had never heard of this person before that night.” Doubling down on his decade-old sentiments, Ye continued, “And ‘Single Ladies’ is, like, one of the greatest videos of all time.”
As much as the mogul cites God as his influence, he did confess to having some liquid courage on hand. In several pre-show clips from 2009, West was seen taking swigs of Hennessy and elaborated on the recently uploaded episode. “I was only drinking Hennessy because I didn’t want to go to the awards show ’cause it was a setup!” The presidential hopeful spoke on other hot topics such as abortion, his GAP deal and fashion industry journey and invoked God at several other points during the sit down.
‘When I went to the hospital the first time one of the things I wrote down was ‘start a church in Calabasas’. I stood in the gap,” he said quoting the Christian terminology. “And God said, I got something for you. Imma have you standing in the GAP for real for real and the funny thing is, it was 27 years since I got fired at the GAP. Every single dime that I had I spent on Sunday service, $50 million dollars. I invested in the church. I invested in spreading gospel and then when people talk about ‘increase,’ that’s the zone.”
