Jay-Z talks about a whole heap of things on new track “100$ bill” which features on The Great Gatsby soundtrack, and one of them is Taylor Swift.
On the record, the rap mogul references Kanye West’s infamous 2009 walk-on during Swift’s acceptance speech at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards after she won the Best Female Video award for “You Belong To Me.”
Few have forgotten West’s — “Taylor, no disrespect to you and Im a let you finish in a minute but Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time” — speech.
At the time, and since, it inspired universal fury and even a “jackass” comment from President Barack Obama.
But it seems Jay-Z has a rather different take on the matter. At exactly, 2:11 on “100$ Bill,” the rapper blisters:
“Einstein, my my, this MC more white squares with my relatives, that cheese made us constipated couldn’t tell us s**t. Took that Taylor Swift to a hundred f***ing million, b***h.”
The most obvious interpretation of Jay-Z’s couplet is that he thinks West’s stage invasion benefited Swift’s career. Certainly, the incident cast the then 19-year-old Swift as an underdog, while celebrities and the press united to express their outrage.
Both Swift’s profile and record stats quantumed as a direct result of the VMA’s, but seeing as her 2006 debut album Taylor Swift notched up sales of 5.6 million and it spent a total of 63 weeks on Billboard’s 200 Album chart (by 2008), it’s perhaps a little rich to suggest her post-VMA career is down to West.
The irony of West’s unsolicited defense of Beyonce is that “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on it)” went on to win Video of the Year at the VMA’s.
Jay-Z, who is married to Beyonce, executive produced the soundtrack for The Great Gatsby — the just released Baz Luhrmann directed film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s same named 1925 novel about a corrupted American dream — and among the artists featured are The xx, Lana Del Rey, Beyonce, Outkast’s Andre 300 and Jack White.
Whether Swift has heard “$100 Bill” isn’t known. But one man who’s more than happy with Jay-Z’s contribution to The Great Gatsby is Lurhmann.
In a recent MTV News interview, the Australian helmer said:
“He totally nailed that the book was aspirational. That the book was really about, if you’ve got a cause, you can move towards a green light. That you don’t reach it isn’t the point; that you aspire is.”
Over to you Swift.
[ Image via s_bukley / Shutterstock.com ]
