Kanye West: What I Learned from the Taylor Swift Incident

Kanye West drops by The Ellen DeGeneres Show for his first sit-down interview in more than a year on Tuesday (October 19).

Here’s what the 33-year-old rapper had to share about the infamous incident at the 2009 VMAs between him and Taylor Swift:

On what he did immediately after the fallout: “I left America. I stopped doing music all together. I just took some time. I went to Japan just so I could get away from paparazzi all together. Then in November I moved to Rome and just lived there and when I came back to the states I moved to Hawaii. I lived there for about six months and just worked on music.”

On his decision to get away from the spotlight: “It was the first time that I got to stop since my Mom had passed. I had never stopped and never tried to even soak in what all had happened … It was time to take a break and develop more as a person as a creator and focus more on my thoughts and my ideas and what I wanted to bring to the world.”

On his “whole world completely crash[ing]“: “I feel like in some ways I’m a solider of culture. I realize that no one wants that to be my job and I’ll never go on stage again. I’ll never sit in an award show again. Will I feel convicted about things that really meant stuff to culture that constantly get denied for years and years? I’m sorry I will. I cannot lie about it to sell records.”