Taylor Swift scored another week at No. 1 and a victory over Kanye West in the process.
Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department celebrates its 14th week atop the Billboard 200 album chart, Billboard reported on Sunday, August 11. TTPD moved another 142,000 equivalent album units to retain the top spot on the chart dated August 17.
West, 47, has to settle for second place on the new Billboard 200. His latest venture with Ty Dolla $ign, Vultures 2, debuts at No. 2 on the chart with 107,000 equivalent album units. It’s Ye’s 13th album to reach the top two, though a rare misstep for the rapper, who has scored 11 No. 1s to date. (Ye and Ty Dolla $ign’s Vultures 1 topped the chart in February.)
Of course, there has long been bad blood between Swift, 34, and West, who name-dropped both Swift and her boyfriend, Travis Kelce, on his new record.
“I twist my Taylor spliffs tight at the end like Travis Kelce,” West raps on the song “Lifestyle (Demo),” making a play on Swift’s first name and Kelce’s NFL position.
Neither Swift nor Kelce have acknowledged the West’s reference publicly, but Kelce’s dad, Ed Kelce, was not pleased by the mention. “Mental illness on full display,” Ed wrote via Facebook on Thursday, August 8, reposting a Daily Mail article about the lyric.
Swift and West’s history with one another goes back to the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, where West infamously interrupted Swift’s acceptance speech for Best Female Video and declared that Beyoncé should have won instead. (Swift won the award for the “You Belong With Me” video, beating Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It.”)
The pair appeared to make up after that, but the feud was reignited in 2016 when West name-checked Swift on his song “Famous.” He rapped, “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / I made that bitch famous.” West claimed he sought Swift’s approval to include the line, which she denied.
Things reached a boiling point when West’s then-wife Kim Kardashian shared an edited clip of a phone call between West and Swift that Kardashian said corroborated his account.
Swift has described the incident as a “career death,” telling TIME magazine in December 2023, “Make no mistake—my career was taken away from me.”
“You have a fully manufactured frame job, in an illegally recorded phone call, which Kim Kardashian edited and then put out to say to everyone that I was a liar,” Swift said. “That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before. I moved to a foreign country. I didn’t leave a rental house for a year. I was afraid to get on phone calls. I pushed away most people in my life because I didn’t trust anyone anymore. I went down really, really hard.”
