It turns out that Kanye West, the man who criticized the Grammys for giving its album of the year award to Beck over Beyonce, hadn’t even heard Beck’s album when he criticized the voters’ choice.
Kanye had went as far as to call for Beck to give the award to Beyonce in order to “respect artistry.”
However, on Friday morning, Kanye admitted to The Breakfast Club Power 105.1 that he hadn’t even heard any of Beck’s album until he had dinner with Taylor Swift (of all people) earlier this week.
Noting that what he said was “completely hypocritical,” Kanye explained how and when he finally got a chance to listen to Beck’s work.
Skip to about 6:45 for the relevant bit.
“I’m going to go ahead and tell y’all that the other day I went to dinner and sat down with Taylor Swift, right. And ironically, they were playing the Beck album. Maybe they did it on purpose so that I could finally hear it but I was like, ‘Man… like, this is kinda good, ain’t gonna lie.'”
When he was asked if he had even heard the album before the Grammys, Kanye confessed in the bluntest terms:
“Nah, I hadn’t heard it man… I bet you that album is really good. I’m going to listen to the album and maybe it was potentially an album of the year but the Grammys are still, they still have a commercial component to it and they want to sell commercials. So they have these big superstars and advertise ‘upcoming’ and ‘coming next’ that’s what they try to do to get those views.”
The fact that Kanye got to hear the Beck album for the first time while at a dinner with Taylor Swift proves that fact is always stranger and more wonderful than fiction.
