Taylor Swift fires back at Kanye West in Grammys acceptance speech

Swift beat out Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp a Butterfly” with her hugely-successful “1989”, which makes Swift the first woman to have ever won the award twice.

Swift wasn’t in the audience to pick up the awards.

The clear but unspoken reference was to Kanye West, who several years ago grabbed a microphone from Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards and last week released a song with a crude comment about her and suggestion that he made her famous. Looking on at right is Anoushka Shankar. She first won Album of the Year in 2010 for the album Fearless.

“My heart was exploding”, she said later.

Once she answered and Antonoff delivered the good news, Swift yelled, “What?!”

The duo posed on the red carpet together and while Taylor wanted to stay with her bestie, Selena had other ideas.

“Is James Taylor there?”

“I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex”.

Beyoncé later made the briefest of appearances to present an award at the end of the 3-1/2-hour show, but did not perform. It will qualify for awards at the 2017 ceremony.

Like usual, West took it way too far on the new track, “Famous”, sounding off with an extremely denigrating statement about Swift – we’ll just leave it at that – that would no-doubt offend her as both an artist and a woman.

Lamar, who already has two Grammys, received the most nominations, with 11.

Other winners included the other album of the year nominees, Alabama Shakes (for alternative music album and best rock song) and Chris Stapleton (for country solo performance), as well as former President Jimmy Carter (for the audiobook of his memoir, “A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety”), Mark Ronson feat.

British singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran won his first Grammys, including song of the year for “Thinking Out Loud”, receiving a big hug from Swift as he went up on stage.

Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk” won “Record of the Year”.

Meghan Trainor, after winning best new artist, couldn’t fight off the tears.

Sam Hunt and Carrie Underwood had an early medley of songs that had one commentator declare, “This performance is the worst”.

Plus, the cast of hit Broadway musical “Hamilton” will hit the stage and rapper Pitbull will close out the awards show.

Wonder, who has won 25 Grammys over his career, was joined by a cappella group Pentatonix for a tribute to Earth, Wind & Fire founder Maurice White, while Eagles musician Glenn Frey, who died last month, was honoured with a special tribute by his bandmates Don Henley, Bernie Leadon, Timothy B Schmit and Joe Walsh and friend Jackson Browne, who performed Take It Easy at the show.