Kanye West - MTV VMAs 2015: Vanguard Acceptance Speech lyrics

Bro. Bro. Listen to the kids. Jeremy, I need, I gotta put it down for a second. It's beautiful. Jeremy Scott's design. First of all, thank you Taylor for being so gracious and giving me this award, this evening thank you. And I can think back to the first day I met you, also. You know. I think about, when I'm in the grocery store with my daughter, and I have a really great conversation about fresh juice and, you know. And at the end they say, "Oh, you're not that bad after all." And like, I think about it sometimes. Like, it crosses my mind a bit like when I go to a baseball game. And um, sixty thousand people boo me. Crosses my mind a little bit. And I think if I had to do it all again what would I have done? Would I have worn a leather shirt? Would I have drank a half a bottle of Hennessy and gave the rest of it to the audience Y'all know y'all drink that bottle too. If I had a daughter at that time, would I have went on stage and grab the mic from someone else's? You know, this arena tomorrow, it's gonna be a completely different set up, some concert something like that. This stage will be gone, after that night, the stage is gone, but the effect that it had on people remain. The, the problem was, the contradiction, the contradiction is, I do fight for artists, but in that fight I somehow, was disrespectful to artists. I-I didn't know how to say the right thing. The perfect thing. I just, I sat at the Grammy's and saw Justin Timberlake and Cee-Lo lose. Gnarls Barkley and the Future-Love... "SexyBack" album, and bro….Justin I ain't tryna put you on blast but I saw that man in tears, bro. You know, and I was thinking like, "He deserve to win Album of the Year." And this small box that we are as the entertainers of the evening. How could you explain that? Sometimes I feel like, you know, all this sh** they run about beef and that, sometimes I feel like I died for an artist's opinion, for an artist to be able to have an opinion after they were successful. I'm not no politician bro. And look at that, you know how many times MTV ran that footage again, cause it got them more ratings? You know how many times they announced Taylor was gonna give me the award, cause it got them more ratings? Listen to the kids bro! I still don't understand award shows, I don't understand how they get five people who work their entire life, won, sold records, sold concert tickets, to come stand on a carpet and for the first time in they live be judged on a chopping block and have the opportunity to be considered a loser. I don't understand it bro. I don't understand when the biggest album or the biggest video, I still don't understand it, I been conflicted bro, I just wanted people to like me more. But f** that bro! Two thousand and fifteen. I will die for the art for what I believe in and the art ain't always gonna be polite. Y'all might be thinking right now, I wonder, did he smoke something before he came up here? The answer is yes, I rolled up a little something, I knocked the edge off. I don't know what's gonna happen tonight, I don't know what's going to happen tomorrow bro. But all I can say to my artists, my fellow artists, just worry how you feel at the time man, just worry about how you feel and don't never, you know what I'm saying, I'm confident, I believe in myself. We the millennials bro, this is a new, this is a new mentality. We not gonna control our kids with brands. We're not gonna teach low self-esteem and hate to our kids, we're gonna teach our kids that they can be something. We gonna teach our kids that they can stand up for themselves. We gonna teach our kids to believe in themselves. If my grandfather was here right now, he would not let me back down. I don't know what I'm finna lose after this. It don't matter though, it ain't about me, it's about ideas. People with new ideas. People who believe in truth. And yes, as you probably could have guessed by this moment, I have decided in 2020, to run for President.