Swift supporter? Kanye West pledged to assist Taylor Swift in her battle to regain the rights to past music catalog amid a Twitter rant against record labels and publishers.
“I’M GOING TO PERSONALLY SEE TO IT THAT TAYLOR SWIFT GETS HER MASTERS BACK,” West, 43, tweeted on Friday, September 18. “SCOOTER IS A CLOSE FAMILY FRIEND.”
The Yeezy designer followed up the Swift-specific comment writing, “CULTURE IS THE MOST POWERFUL FORCE IN HUMANITY UNDER GOD.”
Earlier in the week, the “Jesus Walks” rapper declared “ALL THE MUSICIANS WILL BE FREE” after publicly saying he would not release any new music until his contracts with his publisher, Sony/ATV Music Publishing, and his label, Universal Music Group, are up.
At the time, West, who has a tumultuous past with Swift, 30, following him interrupting her 2009 MTV Video Music Awards acceptance speech, called on the “Exile” singer for her help with his music industry gripes.
“Bono can I get a retweet,” the Sunday Service creator tweeted on Wednesday, September 16, after sharing a series of screenshots of his recording contracts with his fans in hope of getting a lawyer to take a look at them. “Love you Paul can I get a retweet love you Drake Kendrick even Taylor We need you right noooooow ⛷.”
The same day, the “Stronger” artist shared a video of himself peeing on one of his Grammy awards as an act of defiance toward the music industry’s current practices, which he dubbed as “modern day slavery” in a since-deleted tweet.
West claimed during his tweetstorm that “90% of the record contracts on the planet are still on a royalty.”
He alleged that a standard record deal “is a trap to NEVER have you recoup” and said there’s “all these hidden costs like the ‘distribution fees’ many labels put in their contracts to make even more money off our work without even trying.”
The presidential hopeful was supposed to drop his 10th studio album, Donda: With Child, in July, but it was never released.
The “I Love It” rapper’s show of support to Swift came after the Miss Americana documentary star slammed Scooter Braun and music executive Scott Borchetta in June 2019 after Braun, 39, bought her former label, Big Machine Records, and acquired her masters.
“Scooter has stripped me of my life’s work, that I wasn’t given an opportunity to buy,” she wrote in a lengthy Instagram post at the time. “Essentially, my musical legacy is about to lie in the hands of someone who tried to dismantle it. This is my worst case scenario.”
The “22” songstress threw in past issues with West while firing back at Braun, writing, “All I could think about was the incessant, manipulative bullying I’ve received at [Scooter’s] hands for years. Like when Kim Kardashian orchestrated an illegally recorded snippet of a phone call to be leaked and then Scooter got his two clients together to bully me online about it. Or when his client, Kanye West, organized a revenge porn music video which strips my body naked.”
Braun waited until November 2019 to speak out about the fallout between the record label and Swift. “I just think we live in a time of toxic division, and of people thinking that social media is the appropriate place to air out on each other and not have conversations,” he said during the 2019 Entertainment Industry conference. “I don’t like politicians doing it. I don’t like anybody doing it. If that means that I’ve got to be the bad guy longer, I’ll be the bad guy longer, but I’m not going to participate.”
Swift later addressed Big Machine Records’ alleged release of a live album in April 2020 and called it “another case of shameless greed.”
The “Lover” artist’s drama with West, on the other hand, began more than a decade ago when he jumped on the 2009 MTV VMAs stage and declared that Beyoncé should’ve won the Best Female Video category instead of Swift.
Their feud reignited in 2016, when West released “Famous,” which features a lyric about the “Bad Blood” musician. In the song, he raps that he “made that bitch famous,” referring to Swift. He also dropped a music video for the song that featured lookalike sleeping bodies of famous personalities, naked, including the “Betty” singer.
In March, the full tape of the artists’ conversation regarding the track was leaked, proving that Swift had been telling the truth about West never telling her about the “bitch” line. The line he ran by her on the tape was later changed.
