Kanye West was honored in a big way during Sunday night's MTV Video Music Awards by receiving the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award, an accolade previously awarded to superstars like Beyoncé, Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, Madonna and The Beatles throughout the show's more than 20-year tenure.
He accepted the prestigious award but not without a 13minute acceptance speech that blew any previous Kanye moments way out of the water.
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Prior to Yeezy taking the stage, Taylor Swift talked about the infamous 2009 VMAs Best Female Video debacle that pinned the two hit makers against each other for years to follow.
Taylor said any feud between the two was laid to rest long ago, admitting that Kanye's 2004 College Dropout was the first album she bought on iTunes.
"I'm really happy for you and Imma let you finish but Kanye has had one of the greatest careers of all time," Swift playfully joked as the honoree prepared to deliver his speech.
As the crowd chanted his name, West looked visibly overwhelmed before recanting his numerous regrets surrounding the career-polarizing move.
"If I had to do it all over again, what would I have done? Would I have worn a leather shirt? Would I have drank half a bottle of Hennessy and gave the rest of it to the audience...? If I had a daughter at that time would I have gone on stage and grabbed the mic from someone else's?" he asked.West also acknowledged the backlash he has felt throughout his outspoken career: "The contradiction is, I do fight for artists, but in that fight I somehow was disrespectful to artists. I didn't know how to say the right thing, the perfect thing," adding, "Sometimes I feel like I died for the artists' opinion, for the artist to be able to have an opinion after they were successful."
And to top it all off, looks like our great nation might be looking "West" for the 2020 presidential election. Yes, that's right. Kanye announced he's running for president.
