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Matt Lauer on Kanye West's 'Today' Show Interview: 'Nothing Improper About It'

By Zach Dionne

05:19:14PM (ET) Thursday,November 11,2010.

Matt Lauer on Kanye West's 'Today' Show Interview: 'Nothing Improper About It'Kanye West had a Twitter meltdown yesterday surrounding a taped appearance on the 'Today' show. This morning, we got to see what all the fuss was about.

In a fairly standard interview, Matt Lauer asks West about his "George Bush doesn't care about black people" line from 2005 and the Taylor Swift-VMA incident that got cries of racism flipped on Kanye himself.

While producers ran a clip of Kanye's microphone-grabbing stunt at the 2009 VMAs, the rapper stopped talking mid-sentence.

"Yo, how am I supposed to talk if you gonna run this thing in the middle, while I'm talking?" an affronted West asks. "Please don't let that happen again, it's like ridiculous."

Lauer stood by the interview in a closing segment, saying: "It's something we do every day -- when a guest is talking about an incident or a location, we run video of that," Lauer says. "There was nothing improper about it, nothing unusual about it whatsoever."

See the 'Today' show interview that caused Kanye to swear off media appearances:



Earlier in the interview, Lauer asks Kanye to look at George Bush's face in a clip before responding. "I didn't need you guys to show me the tape in order to like prompt my emotion to what I'm going to say," a visibly flustered Kanye says. He also asks some people off camera to "be quiet for a second."

"I came here to say that I made mistakes, that I've grown as a person," West says. "It's not as easy as boxing someone into a villain role or a race role. I did not have enough information in that situation to call [Bush] a racist."

"It sounds to me, not to oversimplify, what you're saying is, 'We're human, we make mistakes, but we have to learn from our mistakes,'" Lauer says. Kanye agrees.

Lauer closed on a conciliatory note: "We look forward to Kanye's return for a special live concert on the plaza on Friday, Nov. 26."

We're not so sure, based on Kanye's post-interview tweet:






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* Controversy still surrounds Kanye at this time. *

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