The Leaked Phone Call That Made Taylor Swift An Industry Plant –  Hw

when people decided I was wicked and evil and conniving and not a good person. That was the one that I couldn’t really bounce back from cuz my whole life was centered around it.   By the summer 2016, Taylor Swift was the most hated woman on the internet. There was a video going around that seemed to catch her in a lie over Kanye’s song Famous.

All of a sudden, there were snake emojis all over everything she posted. #taylorswiftisoverparty is trending worldwide. And the story everybody agreed on was pretty simple. She got caught, she played the victim, she lied about it, and now there was proof. Except the people typing snake under her posts, they were going off of 3 minutes of a 25-minute video.

So, how does Taylor go from almost being canceled on the internet to the biggest pop star   of the last decade? Well, we got to look at what happened after the full video leaked. And the question we have to ask is, was Taylor actually the victim? Or was this her plan the whole time? To understand 2016, you got to go back to the night it all started, September 2009, the MTV Video Music Awards.

Taylor Swift is 19 years old and she just won her first VMA, Best Female Video for You Belong With Me. >> Thank you so much for giving me a chance to win a VMA Award. I >> [cheering] >> YO, TAYLOR. I I’M REALLY HAPPY FOR YOU. I’M let you finish, but Beyoncé had one of the best VIDEOS OF ALL TIME. >> [cheering] >> ONE OF THE BEST VIDEOS OF ALL TIME.

>> [cheering] >> Live in front of the whole industry and the world, the mic just gets taken from her and she gets embarrassed by the number one hip-hop artist at the time. >> What was on your mind when he came up and then he like like they cut off the >> Um well, I I was standing on stage and I was really excited because I had just won the award and then I was really excited because Kanye West was on the stage.

And then I Then I wasn’t so excited anymore. >> Kanye became the villain, and Taylor became the newcomer that needed sympathy. And she used it to her advantage. She went on a 7-year run winning multiple Grammys, shifted her sound from country to pop, and became the all-American girl next door. This was the peak of the good girl image.

She had the Grammys, the squad, the sold-out stadiums. For years, she could do no wrong. Now, fast-forward to the 2015 VMAs. Taylor comes out and actually presents Kanye with an award. And she even flips his old line back on >> So, I guess I have to say to all the other winners tonight, I’m really happy for you.

And I’mma let you finish. But Kanye West has had one of the greatest careers of all time. >> [cheering] >> So, it looked like Kanye and Taylor finally made up. But see, Kanye had an album coming out. And he needed a hit single. But not just a good song. He needed a controversy. A few months later, Taylor’s on vacation, and Kanye calls her up.

He’s working on a new song with a line about her in it, and he wants to read some of it over the phone. Now, Kanye had people recording him in the studio around the clock for his own archive and potential documentary. So, there’s a camera running the whole time. And a couple weeks later, the song drops.

And the main line that caused the controversy >> >> was where Kanye says, “I made that [ __ ] famous.” Then a couple days later, she’s up at the Grammys winning album of the year, and she ends her speech with a shot at Kanye. >> There are going to be people along the way who will try to undercut your success or take credit for your accomplishments or your fame.

>> She never says his name, but she didn’t have to. >> >> So, for a few months, that was a standoff. He said she knew, she said she didn’t, and nobody can prove either way. But then in July, Kim Kardashian ends the debate, or at least that’s what it looked like. >> She legitimately quote says, “As soon as I get on that Grammy red carpet, I’m going to tell all the press like I was in on it.

” >> And she just didn’t like the reaction. >> Yeah, and you know, just another way to play the victim. Definitely got her a lot of attention the first time. >> Kim Kardashian goes on Snapchat and post clips from the recorded phone call. And in them, you got Kanye on the phone and Taylor sounding like she’s totally fine with everything.

>> really appreciate you telling me about it. That’s really nice. >> Oh, yeah. I thought I just had a responsibility to you as a friend, you know? And I mean, thanks I mean, thanks for being like so cool about it. >> Oh, thank you. >> Yeah. >> Um, yeah, I really appreciate it. Like the heads-up is so nice.

Like even asking or seeing if I’d be okay with it, and I just really appreciate it. Like I never would have expected you to like tell me about the whole line and everything. Um. >> And that was all it took. The party’s over hashtag is trending worldwide. Her comments turn into nothing but snake emojis.

And just like that, she’s a liar to the whole internet. >> Hashtag Taylor Swift is over party was the number one trending on Twitter worldwide. Do you know how many people have to be tweeting that they hate you for that to happen? >> Taylor puts out a note saying that she was never played the actual line, that you can’t approve a song that you haven’t heard.

And the part everybody remembers is, “I would very much like to be excluded from this narrative.” Nobody’s buying it because the video said otherwise. At least at the moment, >> >> Taylor Swift, her brand is finished. And when the whole internet’s turned on you like this, there’s basically two ways you can go.

You can fight it, or you can say sorry. But Taylor didn’t do either one of those things. >> The 27-year-old singer posted this video to her social media platforms on Monday. It appears to show a snake’s >> What? >> tail >> Really? >> recoiling. Yes, last Friday Swift took down all content from her social media accounts and website.

>> She comes back as the snake. She puts out reputation, and the whole thing is her leaning into her darker and edgier side. The exact thing that they used to cut her down. Now, she takes the insult, slaps it on merch, builds the stage around it, sells it back to everybody. Now, in the entertainment business, when there’s a story running against you, you don’t win by arguing against it.

You take it, you make it yours, and you make a little money off of it. >> I guess the snakes have wanted to send a message to you guys that if someone someone uses name-calling to bully you on social media, and you feel a lot of people jump on board with it, that doesn’t have to defeat you. It can strengthen you instead.

>> It’s Taylor’s turn to be the villain now. But the problem is some people thought that this made her look even more guilty. Conspiracy theories started going around that this was all some initiation ritual to increase her fame. Now, it sounds silly, and some people connected to the Illuminati, but this is a strategy a lot of artists use.

The good girl gone bad narrative. Rihanna went through it. Beyoncé did it with her Sasha Fierce era. Katy Perry literally gave up her gospel career. And we’re not even going to talk about the post-Disney Miley Cyrus. But theories are still being thrown around about this whole thing to this day.

Now, with everything that came to light about Diddy, there’s a big debate about whether what Kanye did was to bully Taylor or was it to save her from Diddy and from Beyoncé who was supposedly jealous. The music industry can be dark, so I guess nothing is impossible, but these theories are pretty far-fetched. So, no, I don’t think Taylor joined some secret society to sell records.

She was just capitalizing on a bad situation. And it worked. Look What You Made Me Do broke the record for the biggest music video debut in YouTube history. Reputation ended up the best-selling album of the year. She took the worst moment of her career and she turned it into one of her biggest paydays. Doing her edgy bad girl revenge thing was working for her.

But then something even better happened. In 2020, everybody’s online more than ever because of the COVID pandemic. And then the full video of the call gets leaked. It went viral on Twitter after being reposted by a Taylor Swift fan account. But to this day, nobody knows how it got out of Kanye’s camp.

>> It has a very controversial line at the beginning of the song about you. >> What does it say? >> All right. So, it says and the song is so so dope and I’ve literally sat with my wife and tried to rework this line I’ve thought about this line for eight months. >> Well, is it going to be mean? >> No, I don’t think it’s mean.

>> Okay, then what then let me hear it. >> Okay. It says um to all my South side [ __ ] that know me best I feel like Taylor Swift might owe me sex. >> No, it’s not mean. >> Okay. >> The truth was Kanye hid the full line that started the whole fallout. I made that [ __ ] famous. She okayed the version of it, but she never okayed that part.

Taylor posted that the footage proved that she’d been telling the truth the whole time about a call that was in her words illegally recorded, edited, and used to frame her and put her family through years of hell. Now, on the legal side, recording someone’s phone call without consent is a crime in the state of California, but nobody was ever charged and nobody was sued.

But, being proven right was only half of it because now, not only is she only even more famous, >> >> now she’s about to gain power. The first version of it was a reputation era, her taking the story back and making it hers. Then, in 2019, the rights to her music catalog gets bought and sold by people that she didn’t want to own her work.

Scooter Braun, who’s had a fallout with quite a few artists, he buys her old record label for around $300 million and he wouldn’t let her buy her masters. Instead, he sold them to Shamrock Holdings so let Scooter Braun keep a percentage of Taylor’s music. Now, the 2009 to 2015 version of Taylor probably would have made peace with that, but not this version.

This version of Taylor decides to re-record all of her music herself and make her own masters. >> Good morning America, it’s Taylor. I just wanted to say, first of all, you guys have been so supportive of Good Morning America since day one of this entire process of me re-recording my music and I’m so ecstatic that my album Fearless Taylor’s Version will be out tonight.

>> Fans started to stream her version of the songs instead of the original songs. Folklore and Evermore got the critics who spent years writing her off to take her seriously again. The Eras Tour becomes the biggest tour in history and Time names her person of the year. And just last year, in 2025, she buys her original music back.

So, now she owns >> >> everything. All of a sudden, she’s the first musician to become a billionaire strictly through her music and her performances. So, the video that was supposed to be the end of her is a big part of how she got to the top. It gave her the grit to take on the biggest players in the business and beat them.

But being at the top doesn’t come without criticism. Some people say Taylor’s songs are starting to blend together and she’s at a point in her career where she’s playing it safe. And some people say that she inserts herself where she shouldn’t be, like during the Super Bowl in 2024. Some fans complained that the camera kept cutting to her while she was cheering on Travis Kelce.

And some of the media was making it all about her instead of the game. It even got to a point where she was getting booed in the stadium. Then earlier this month, the wedding, Madison Square Garden, a thousand guests, a congresswoman even demanded the couple pay the city back for all the police that it took to lock the place down.

But a big question a lot of people still have is whether the video and the whole Kanye controversy was orchestrated. Now, honestly, there’s no way to know for sure. But in the music business, there’s PR and image people who handle things like this all the time. And I’ve seen it firsthand in my own experience with the industry.

Celebrities working with tabloid and news outlets just to get a story out. But I can’t help but wonder because Kanye didn’t actually make her famous, she was already on her way. But would she be as big as she is now if the VMAs and the video of the phone call never happened? The good thing about Taylor though is she was able to play the good girl and embrace her dark side and be successful at both.

But that’s not the case for everybody. Artists like Katy Perry actually was the good girl for her childhood and her teenage years until she realized it was never going to get her where she wanted to be. But now she feels like she lost herself altogether. Check out this video if you want to hear more about her story.

QQ4 Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The friendship began on a live television program in November of 1986 in the 11 seconds after Bob Dylan called Keith Richards music derivative on camera. Keith Richard’s response to that assessment, one sentence said without anger, without performance, with the specific directness of a man who has nothing to prove and knows it made Bob Dylan laugh.

Then made Bob Dylan go quiet. then made Bob Dylan say two words that people who know Bob Dylan say he almost never said to anyone. This is the story of those 11 seconds and the 40 years that followed them. The program was a live music interview special broadcast on an American network on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The format was simple.

Two musicians, a host, an hour of conversation about music and the state of it. The producers had assembled the pairing of Bob Dylan and Keith Richards with the specific calculation of television producers who understand that two people with equally strong and potentially incompatible views about what music is and what it should do will produce better television than two people who agree about everything.

The calculation was correct, though not in the way the producers had anticipated. Bob Dylan was 45 years old in November of 1986. Bob Dylan had released Empire Burlesque the previous year and had been on the road for most of the intervening period as part of the True Confessions tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

Bob Dylan was in November of 1986 in one of the most prolific and restless phases of a career that had consisted almost entirely of prolific and restless phases. A career that had moved through folk, rock, country, gospel, and back again, that had been declared finished at least six times by the music press, and at each time continued with the serene indifference of a river to the opinions of people standing on its banks.

Bob Dylan had been redefining what music could be. Since 1962, Bob Dylan had invented and reinvented himself so many times that reinvention had become his defining characteristic, not in the superficial sense of a performer changing costumes, but in the deeper sense of a musician who had never allowed his work to settle into a form that could be anticipated or categorized from the outside.

Bob Dylan understood influence and originality and the relationship between them better than almost anyone alive in 1986. Bob Dylan had spent 24 years thinking carefully and specifically about where music came from and where music was going and what it meant that those two things were always in constant conversation with each other.

Keith Richards was 42 years old in November of 1986. Keith Richards had been playing guitar professionally since 1962. Keith Richards had built a career on a foundation of American blues and rhythm and blues. A foundation that Keith Richards had studied with the systematic devotion of someone who understood that the tradition he was building on was not incidental to the music he was making, but essential to it.

that you could not understand what Keith Richards did without understanding where Keith Richards had come from and what Keith Richards had been listening to since he was a teenager in Dartford with American Import Records and a secondhand guitar and no teacher except the recordings themselves. Keith Richards had never pretended otherwise. Keith Richards had in fact spent considerable energy across his career making the lineage explicit, naming the artists, citing the recordings, insisting on the acknowledgement of influence that the mainstream music

industry had a long history of suppressing or ignoring or crediting to the wrong people. If anything, Keith Richards was more transparent about his sources than most musicians of his generation. Keith Richards had always said openly that the Rolling Stones came directly from the blues, that Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and the specific tradition of the Mississippi Delta were not background influences, but foundational ones.

The music Keith Richards made was in direct and sustained conversation with that tradition, something Keith Richards considered not a limitation, but a responsibility and a form of respect. The interview had been running for 8 minutes when the host asked Bob Dylan about the current state of rock and roll.

Bob Dylan answered with the density and the indirection that characterized Bob Dylan’s responses to direct questions, turning the question over, approaching it from an unexpected angle, finding his way to what he actually thought through a series of observations that moved like a river rather than a road. Bob Dylan was not a straightforward interview subject.

Bob Dylan had been asked about rock and roll in hundreds of interviews across 24 years and had developed the habit of treating the question as an invitation to think out loud rather than a request for a prepared position. The producer Gerald Sherman said afterward that in the first 8 minutes of the interview, he had been slightly anxious, not because anything was going wrong, but because nothing was going anywhere in particular yet.

The interview had the feeling of two conversations happening simultaneously. Bob Dylan’s internal one and the external one visible to the cameras. And Gerald Sherman was not certain in those first eight minutes that the two conversations would converge into something. Bob Dylan talked about influence. Bob Dylan talked about originality.

Bob Dylan talked about the difference between music that absorbed a tradition and transformed it and music that absorbed a tradition and reproduced it. And then Bob Dylan made his assessment. And then Bob Dylan said with the precision of a man making a musical assessment rather than a personal judgment that the Rolling Stones work, and Bob Dylan was specific, naming Keith Richards as the guitarist whose approach he was discussing was derivative in a way that Bob Dylan found limiting.

Bob Dylan said it without hostility. Bob Dylan said it as a technical observation about the relationship between source material and the work that came from it. Bob Dylan said that Keith Richards played the blues the way the blues had already been played, rather than using the blues as a starting point for something that had not yet been played.

Keith Richards had been listening to this with the specific attention Keith Richards gave to things being said about music by people who knew music. Keith Richards did not interrupt. Keith Richards did not shift in his chair or display any of the visible signals of a person preparing a defensive response. Keith Richards listened to Bob Dylan’s complete observation all the way to its conclusion without interrupting and without displaying any visible signal of preparing a response.

Then Keith Richards said one sentence. The sentence was not a rebuttal. The sentence did not defend Keith Richards music or argue for its originality or challenge Bob Dylan’s characterization of what the blues meant in the context of rock and roll. The sentence was something else entirely, something that required a specific kind of confidence to say.

The confidence of a person who has spent long enough thinking about the same things as the person they are talking to that they can locate the exact point where their thinking diverges and say something useful about that point rather than simply defending their own position. The sentence acknowledged everything Bob Dylan had said, the assessment, the distinction Bob Dylan was drawing, the specific musical concern underlying the observation, and then turned it 90°.

Keith Richards took Bob Dylan’s own framework, the one Bob Dylan had used to analyze Keith Richards relationship to the blues tradition, and applied it back to Bob Dylan’s work with the same precision Bob Dylan had used to apply it to Keith Richards. Spare aimed. The sentence asked Bob Dylan something about Bob Dylan’s own music, about the relationship between Bob Dylan’s sources and Bob Dylan’s output that Bob Dylan had not been asked on television before.

The sentence did not attack. The sentence illuminated. Bob Dylan laughed. The laugh was not the polite laugh of someone responding to a joke. The laugh was the involuntary laugh of someone who has been genuinely surprised. The specific kind of surprise that a person of exceptional intelligence experiences when someone else’s intelligence exceeds their expectations.

Bob Dylan laughed for 4 seconds. Then Bob Dylan stopped laughing. Then Bob Dylan was quiet for 3 seconds in the way that Bob Dylan was quiet when Bob Dylan was thinking rather than performing thought. Then Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” The producer in the booth, a man named Gerald Sherman, who had been working in television for 14 years, said afterward that in 14 years of live television production, he had never heard Bob Dylan say those two words in a public forum.

Gerald Sherman said he had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions and had observed Bob Dylan in numerous other contexts and that you’re right was not a phrase that Bob Dylan deployed easily or often because Bob Dylan had spent 24 years being right about music in ways that other people eventually caught up with. And the experience of being right ahead of everyone else does not generally produce a man who says you’re right readily when someone else makes a point.

The host of the program, a journalist named Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said afterward that the 11 seconds between Bob Dylan’s assessment and Bob Dylan saying, “You’re right,” were the most extraordinary 11 seconds of television she had been present for. Patricia Wells said that what she witnessed in those 11 seconds was not a debate or a confrontation or a celebrity exchange of competing opinions.

Patricia Wells said what she witnessed was one musician recognizing another musician as an equal, which was in the specific context of Bob Dylan in 1986, not something that happened in public very often. The interview continued for another 42 minutes after those 11 seconds. The conversation between Bob Dylan and Keith Richards in the remaining 42 minutes was described by everyone who watched it as fundamentally different from the first 8 minutes.

The host, Patricia Wells, who had been conducting music interviews for 12 years and understood the difference between the performance of conversation and actual conversation, said that at approximately the 9-minute mark, something shifted in the studio. That the formal interview, architecture dissolved, and what replaced it was something less structured and more genuine.

Bob Dylan and Keith Richards talked about influence and originality and the blues and what it meant to build on a tradition without being consumed by it. They talked about specific recordings and specific musicians with the specificity of two people who had spent their entire adult lives thinking about these things and rarely found another person who had thought about them with equivalent care.

They talked about where music came from and where music was going and whether those two questions were actually one question or two. Patricia Wells said afterward that she had asked approximately four questions in the remaining 42 minutes because Bob Dylan and Keith Richards did not require questions. They required only a room and a camera and the shared understanding that what they were saying together was worth recording carefully.

She said it was the best interview she had ever conducted and that she had conducted the smallest part of it. After the program, Bob Dylan and Keith Richards were in the corridor outside the studio when the host Patricia Wells passed them. Patricia Wells said she did not stop because she did not want to interrupt.

She observed them for approximately 30 seconds from a distance. She said they were talking with the ease of people who had known each other for years rather than people who had met for the first time 2 hours earlier. She said that something had shifted between them during the broadcast that the broadcast had made permanent rather than temporary.

She continued down the corridor and did not look back. She said in her account of that evening that she had decided in that moment not to interrupt the conversation because some conversations are more valuable than any question a journalist might ask and that the conversation she had observed for 30 seconds in the corridor outside the studio was one of them.

She had been a music journalist for 12 years. She recognized the difference. Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have maintained their friendship across four decades. They have appeared together at various events, most significantly at the concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, where people who were present described them as inseparable for most of the evening, occupying the same corner of the backstage area and talking with the concentrated attention of people who only have a limited amount of time together and intend to use it

well. Bob Dylan has spoken about Keith Richards in interviews with the specific thoughtful care that Bob Dylan reserves for musicians whose work Bob Dylan considers genuinely important rather than merely culturally prominent. Keith Richards has spoken about Bob Dylan in similar terms with the specific respect of someone who recognizes in another person a commitment to music that goes deeper than career.

Neither Bob Dylan nor Keith Richards has made a public statement specifically about how the friendship began or about the November 1986 interview. Bob Dylan has not mentioned the 11 seconds. Keith Richards has not mentioned the sentence. The interview exists in the archive. The 11 seconds are there. The laugh is there. The two words are there.

What is also there for anyone who watches the interview from its beginning and pays attention to the shift that happens at the 9-minute mark is the specific moment when two people who thought they were appearing on a television program discovered they were actually talking to each other. What Keith Richards said in that one sentence has never been officially reported.

The people who were in the studio that evening, Gerald Sherman, Patricia Wells, the floor crew, the two camera operators, the makeup artist who was watching from the side of the set, have described the sentence in consistent terms. They have described its effect. They have described Bob Dylan’s laugh and Bob Dylan’s silence and Bob Dylan’s two words.

They have not repeated the sentence itself in the specific understanding that the sentence was said between two musicians on a television program and that its power resided in the specific context of that exchange and would not survive removal from it intact. What can be said is this. Keith Richards said something to Bob Dylan about Bob Dylan’s music that used Bob Dylan’s own observation about Keith Richards as its starting point and arrived somewhere that Bob Dylan had not anticipated.

Keith Richards turned Bob Dylan’s assessment 90° and showed Bob Dylan something about the music they had both spent their lives making that Bob Dylan recognized immediately as true. And Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” Two words said by Bob Dylan in public on live television in 1986 to Keith Richards in response to a single sentence Keith Richards had said about music.

Two words that Gerald Sherman, who had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions, said he had never heard Bob Dylan say in a public forum. Two words that Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said were the most significant two words she had heard in those 12 years. Not because of their content, but because of who said them and what it cost to say them and what it meant that Keith Richards had produced them in 11 seconds from a conversation that began with Bob Dylan calling Keith Richards’s music derivative. And Keith Richards and

Bob Dylan have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The sentence did its work in 11 seconds on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The work has been ongoing ever since. If this story moved you, subscribe and leave a comment below. Have you ever said something to someone that turned a potential disagreement into an unexpected and lasting connection? Tell us about it in the comments below.

Share this with someone who needs to be reminded that the right sentence said at the right moment can completely change the entire direction of a relationship. Ring the notification bell for more untold stories about the extraordinary human beings behind music’s greatest legends.