Jay Leno Once Made Kanye West Cry On His Late Night Show
Although rapper Kanye "Ye" West may be dominating headlines for having made numerous controversial and antisemitic statements online, anyone following the award-winner since the onset of his fame in the early 2000s will recall that he was no stranger to controversy before 2022.
In fact, arguably his most notable controversy likely came in 2009, when he famously took the stage from Taylor Swift at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards after she had won the award for Best Video by a Female Artist, in order to declare that Beyoncé had in fact deserved the award for her "Single Ladies" music video. The move was widely publicized and denounced, with even Beyoncé herself saying she was essentially mortified by the incident, per MTV.
However, what many fans may not know about the incident is that while apologizing for it on Jay Leno's late night talk show, Ye uncharacteristically got emotional about it, in no small part due to his late mother.
Kanye West cried on Jay Leno's show while recalling his mother
On Monday, September 14, 2009, the night after Kanye "Ye" West's famous outburst at the MTV Video Music Awards, talk show host Jay Leno invited him on his show in part to discuss the incident. It was Ye's first public appearance since the ceremony.
Ye (then known by his birth name) said that the last 24 hours had been "extremely difficult," as he only later discovered how much he hurt Taylor Swift with his actions. However, things got much more intense when Leno asked him how his mother Donda, who died in 2007, would have reacted to the incident. After a long pause, Ye got emotional and spoke about the own "hurt" in life and how that caused him to lash out. "Yeah, you know obviously I deal with hurt," he said, "and so many celebrities never take the time off and I've never taken the time off to really, you know [it's just] music after music, tour after tour, and [it's just] a shame that my hurt caused someone else's hurt."
Although Ye never actually apologized to Swift during the appearance, he did make a formal apology in a blog post released earlier that day. "That was Taylor's moment and I had no right in any way to take it from her," he wrote on his website, per MTV. "I am truly sorry."
Kanye West was very close with his mother
Although he did not directly speak about his mother during the 2009 Jay Leno appearance, Kanye West clearly alluded to her while speaking of the "hurt" he had recently experienced, as he was likely alluding to her sudden and unexpected death in 2007. Fans of the old-school Ye will recall how close he was to his mother, and how deeply her sudden death at the age of 58 affected him. He described his first album after her death, "808s & Heartbreak," for instance, as "a little bit of autotune and a whole lot of f***ed up life," per MTV. "This album was therapeutic, it's lonely at the top."
Additionally, many theorized that his revolutionary use of auto-tune, which had rarely been used in rap at that point, was a way to convey his deep and complex emotions in a way which he couldn't through rap, per Miscellany News.
During the Leno appearance, while recalling his mother, Ye also spoke about how he intended to grow and improve as a person from the experience. "I need to, after this, just take some time off and analyze how I'm gonna make it through the rest of this life," Ye said. "How I'm gonna improve, because I am a celebrity and that's something I have to deal with, and if there's anything I can do to help Taylor and [in] the future help anyone, I wanna live this thing."