It's been less than 24 hours since Kanye West debuted his new album, The Life of Pablo, in a splashy live show at Madison Square Garden — but true to form, the album is already stirring up controversy. Much of the backlash has stemmed from a couplet from the song "Famous," which seems to throw a cup of gasoline on the dying embers of West's long-standing feud with Taylor Swift: "I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / I made that b---h famous."
In the hours that followed, several members of the Swift camp reacted; her brother Austin posted a video of himself throwing away a pair of shoes from West's Yeezy fashion line, and friend Jaime King deleted her initial, enthusiastic posts about West's show, declaring herself, "so sad right now & disappointed right now."
Kanye West, being Kanye West, responded to the controversy via his preferred medium: a typo-laden tweetstorm, in which he claimed (1) that he ran the lyric by wife Kim Kardashian first; (2) that he had an hour-long phone conversation with Swift, in which she said the line "was funny" and "gave her blessings"; (3) that the line originated with Swift anyway, who allegedly told a mutual friend that she couldn't be mad at Kanye because he "made [her] famous!"
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Does that settle things? Probably not, since Swift's rep has already issued a statement claiming that Swift was totally unaware of the specifics of the lyric. Instead, the rep says, she declined a request from West to promote the song via her Twitter account, and "cautioned him about releasing a song with such a strong misogynistic message." For now, it's he-said/she-said — until West starts tweeting again.
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