Shockingly, there was no face-to-face interaction between Taylor Swift and Kanye West at the 2010 Video Music Awards. Both artists nonetheless made independent impacts at the annual awards show.
Midway through the show, Swift performed a passionate, haunting ballad that remarked “you’re still an innocent.” Based on the lyrics, including a reference to someone still growing up at age 32, the presumption is that her song was a message of absolution for Kanye West. During last year’s awards show, Kanye West stormed the stage during her acceptance speech for Best Female Video to declare that Beyonce was the rightful winner for her “Single Ladies.”
Other references in the song suggest Swift might have simultaneously talking about the preservation of her own innocence following an encounter that certainly shook her naiveté.
West, meanwhile, closed the show with “Runaway,” a song that sardonically encouraged a toast for the “douchebags,” “assholes” and “jerkoffs.” The focus was not as strikingly pointed as Swift’s (and he traded Swift’s stripped-down set for a visually-stunning stage show), but the content could be just as hard-hitting. West’s lyrics seemed to suggest an insight into his (and society’s, as was evidenced in a discussion about Angelina’s hookup habits during Sunday’s “Jersey Shore” episode) unshakable ability to masterfully find a way to bring out one’s negative, “douchebag” tendencies.