Kanye West Vs. Matt Lauer On The ‘Today Show’: Watch The Interview

Robbie Daw | November 11, 2010 8:48 am

Kanye West probably gave the best publicity in the world for his then-unaired Today Show interview yesterday when he fired off a series of emotional, ranting tweets against the NBC morning program and the way, he says, Matt Lauer tried to force his answers. Head below to watch the one-on-one that got West so up in arms. While Kanye was forming a carefully-worded apology for previous comments he’d made on television about President George Bush after the 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster, Lauer told producers to run a tape of Bush talking about the incident and said to West, “Don’t even listen this time. I want you to just look at his face…”

“I didn’t need you guys to play the tape in order to prompt my emotion to what I’m going to say,” the rapper said, clearly irritated. “I don’t have to do TV stuff, with me. This is reality. This is the real thing going on, you know what I’m saying? I don’t need all the jazz.”

After that, there were some awkward pauses in the conversation. Eventually, things turned toward Taylor Swift. As Kanye tweeted yesterday, a clip of the 2009 MTV VMAs incident between he and the BMI Country Songwriter Of The Year was rolled as he was talking.

What he got out just before the video began to play was this: “It was so funny to me that it could be [considered] a race thing because what I was expressing was my frustration from years and years of seeing…”

Finally West broke off and said, “Yo, how am I supposed to talk if you’re gonna run this thing in the middle while I’m talking?”

Lauer asked for the sound to be lowered on the VMAs clip, and told West, “Just pick up.”

“Please don’t let that happen. It’s ridiculous,” the rapper said. Then the interview appears to have ended.

What do you think? Was Matt Lauer trying to manipulate Kanye’s emotions here, or was West overreacting to, as the Today Show host said, tactics that are used all the time during interviews?

Either way, let’s just see if Yeezy actually keeps that scheduled November 26 live concert appearance for the show in his calendar.