The Kanye West-Taylor Swift VMA Meltdown Still Shapes Pop Culture Today
Washington Post reporter Emily Yahr looks at how the moment shaped American pop culture for the last decade.
It has been ten years since Kanye West’s infamous interruption of pop and country star Taylor Swift during the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards.
West, upset that Swift had won video of the year for “You Belong With Me” instead of Beyonce’s “Single Ladies.”
Despite the brevity and spontaneous nature of that moment, Washington Post entertainment writer Emily Yahr says it has influenced an entire decade of pop culture, and serves as a kind of dividing line for race and music and a whole lot of other dynamics.
Yahr recently wrote a piece in the Washington Post is titled, “Taylor & Kanye: How two superstars, four words and 15 seconds of TV influenced a decade of pop culture.”
“The more I looked into it and really looked at how it impacted [their careers] I realized that it had all these ripple effects that I hadn’t really thought about,” Yahr tells Stephen Henderson on Detroit Today.