Kim Kardashian’s Taylor Swift-Kanye West Snapchat story, explained

Kim Kardashian’s Taylor Swift Snapchat is proof that Swift might be a cold-blooded pop star

Fourteen years ago, when Taylor Swift was just 12, a woman named Whitney Houston asked for the receipts. It was a simple request. Journalist Diane Sawyer had asked Houston to comment on an alleged $730,000 drug problem.

"I wanna see the receipts." Houston calmly replied, daring Sawyer to come up with an itemized list of purchases from Houston’s alleged dealer. She repeated: "I wanna see the receipts."

The logic: No matter how off Houston might have seemed at the time, she wanted to see proof that she was consuming enough illegal substances to pay for a one-bedroom Manhattan apartment. Sawyer could not manifest that proof. And even if Houston was most likely not of sound mind, no one had the receipts to pin her down.

On that glorious day, the concept of receipts — the damning, smoking-gun evidence that something occurred — was created. It wasn’t common to demand "receipts" yet, but it would be. Taylor Swift, then 12, had no idea that Kim Kardashian would one day release the most damning pop music receipts in recent memory: Taylor Swift lied about Kanye West, and there’s video to prove it.

Kim Kardashian released THE conversation between Kanye and Taylor Swift on Snapchat

On Sunday night, Kardashian posted a series of videos on Snapchat in which West, her husband, was talking to Swift on the phone about his song "Famous" — a song that Swift has labeled as offensive and derogatory. Because Snapchat is a strange beast and everything on the social media platform is temporary, here is a (hopefully more permanent) video of what Kim posted, as recorded by a Kanye West fan Twitter account:

PART 1: Kanye calling Taylor Swift to tell her about the #FAMOUS lyrics. Courtesy of KKW. pic.twitter.com/TIiqxxzLUh

— TeamKanyeDaily (@TeamKanyeDaily) July 18, 2016

In it, you can hear West clearly talking to Swift about his song in a really polite voice. She’s pretty cordial too.

"I really appreciate you telling me about it. That’s really nice," she says. "It’s all very tongue-in-cheek either way."

If you’re just tuning in to the ongoing drama between Swift, West, and Kardashian, the video looks like two friends chatting. To unlock the full, swirling vortex of feuds you actually have to go all the way back to the beginning of the year.

In February, Swift and West had a very public fight over lyrics he rapped in "Famous," then a new song. During West's fashion show/album drop live event at Madison Square Garden, he dropped a verse about having sex with Swift someday, because he believes he made her famous:

I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex

Why? I made that bitch famous

God damn

I made that bitch famous

Swift took offense to this. In a statement to the press, her team said the lyrics were inappropriate, noting, "Kanye did not call for approval, 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 messagesge