LOS ANGELES Rapper Kendrick Lamar led the Grammy winners on Monday with five wins, but Taylor Swift nabbed album of the year - the night's top prize - in an upset victory.
Swift took home three awards out of her seven nominations, including best pop vocal album for "1989", the world's best-selling album of 2014.
Compton, California rapper Lamar went into the awards with 11 nominations, and had looked on course to take album of the year for his critically-acclaimed "To Pimp A Butterfly."
But it was country-turned-pop artist Swift who won, and delivered an acceptance speech about female empowerment.
R&B singer Bruno Mars and producer Mark Ronson won record of the year for their upbeat track "Uptown Funk!"
"Thank you guys so much. This is dedicated to the fans. We wouldn't be up here if it wasn't for the people dancing to this song," Mars said.
British singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran won his first Grammy awards on Monday, including song of the year for "Thinking Out Loud."
Taylor Swift Fires Back at Kanye West in Grammys Acceptance Speech
On his recent Tidal-released album The Life of Pablo, Kanye West took a left-field shot at Taylor Swift. “For all my Southside niggas that know me best / I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / Why? I made that bitch famous / God damn / I made that bitch famous,” he raps on the track “Famous.”
The incident West was referring to was, of course, the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, where a Hennessy’d-up West stormed the stage, snatched the microphone from Swift, and proclaimed that Beyoncé should’ve won instead, forever immortalizing the words “I’mma let you finish, but…”
Swift addressed the lyrics while accepting the 2016 Grammy Award for Album of the Year—an award that she won over the far more deserving Kendrick Lamar for his brilliant LP To Pimp a Butterfly.
“As the first woman to win Album of the Year at the Grammys twice, I wanna say to all the young women out there: There are going to be people along the way who will try to undercut your success, or take credit for your accomplishments or your fame, but if you just focus on the work and you don’t let those people sidetrack you, someday when you get where you’re going, you’ll look around and you’ll know that it was you and the people who love you that put you there, and that will be the greatest feeling in the world,” said Swift.
The inclusion of the Swift lyrics on “Famous” is strange given that back in August, she presented him with the Video Vanguard Award at the VMAs, where she said The College Dropout was the first album she bought on iTunes, and claimed that the two were friends.
Well, it seems they’re again on the outs. While West alleged that he didn’t diss Swift, that the lyrics were cleared with her in advance and she “gave her blessings,” and that they were actually her idea—not so, according to Swift’s representative.
“Kanye did not call for approval,” said her rep, “but to ask Taylor to release his single ‘Famous’ on her Twitter account. She declined and cautioned him about releasing a song with such a strong misogynistic message. Taylor was never made aware of the actual lyric, ‘I made that bitch famous.’”