The Bite Magazine - issue 16

NYE WEST KANYE WEST W hat can we say about rapper Kanye West? Well, we can say for certain that he has a way of ‘stepping on people’s toes’. At the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, the eccentric rapper took it upon himself to steal the lime- light from singer Taylor Swift before she even had a chance to give her acceptance speech for winning the award for Best Female Video. He immediately rushed onto the stage, grabbed the microphone out of the startled singer’s hands and aired his objections:“I’m sorry, but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time!” refer- ring to the danceable ‘Single Ladies’. Of course, the teenaged Swift who had won the award for her high school love song ‘You BelongWith Me’ was very upset. She told People magazine,“I was standing onstage, and I was really excited because I’d just won the award, and then I was really excited because KanyeWest was onstage. And then I wasn’t excited anymore after that.” Who can blame her after that disrespectable outburst? It is no surprise that this is not the first time that West has made his displeasure at Award shows known. At the 2004 American Music Awards, he walked out after losing the Best New Artist title to country singer Gretchen Wilson and complained backstage that he was “the best new artist this year”. Two years later, he effectively threw his toys out of the pram when he crashed the stage of the 2006 MTV Europe Music Awards and launched into a profanity-laced rant after losing in the Best Hip-Hop Artist category to Justice and Simian. The rapper complained that his ‘Touch the Sky’ video was better because it ‘cost a million dollars’ as well as the fact that actress Pamela Anderson was in it and he was jumping across canyons. Surprisingly, he later apologised KAN E WEST KANYE WEST E EST KANYE WEST KANYE WEST lo bite music celeb