“Basically, I got really sick of the dynamic between he and I,” the 29-year-old singer said of her on-again-off-again friendship with West, which ended for good in 2016 when the rapper’s wife, Kim Kardashian, released a recording of a call between him and Swift.
That infamous phone call—one Swift played off of on her 2017 track, "Look What You Made Me Do"—is the one she had with Kanye West about lyrics on his 2016 song, "Famous." As fans can recall, Kim Kardashian shared footage of that phone call publicly on Snapchat, in which the rapper shared the line, "To all my southside n****s that know me best, I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex. Why? I made that bitch famous," with the songstress.
"That's how all of this started, a stupid phone call I shouldn't have picked up," Swift told Rolling Stone.
Swift fumed over the lyric, initially claiming she never gave him permission, but was forced to backtrack when Kardashian released a recording of Swift telling Kanye the lyric was “a compliment.” The singer insisted that she only approved the line referring to them having sex.
“When I heard the song, I was like, ‘I’m done with this. If you want to be on bad terms, let’s be on bad terms, but just be real about it,'” she said, adding that West did the same thing to Drake when he allegedly told Pusha T that Drake had a secret child, which Pusha T later put in one of his songs. “He gravely affected the trajectory of Drake’s family and their lives. It’s the same thing. Getting close to you, earning your trust, detonating you.”
“I really don’t want to talk about it anymore because I get worked up, and I don’t want to just talk about negative s**t all day, but it’s the same thing. Go watch Drake talk about what happened,” she added.
She also remembered how West asked her to present him with the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award ahead of the 2015 VMAs.
“I was so stoked that he asked me that,” she said. “And so I wrote this speech up, and then we get to the VMAs and I make this speech and he screams, ‘MTV got Taylor Swift up here to present me this award for ratings!’ And I’m standing in the audience with my arm around his wife, and this chill ran through my body. I realized he is so two-faced. That he wants to be nice to me behind the scenes, but then he wants to look cool, get up in front of everyone and talk s**t. And I was so upset.”