Kanye Still Frustrated with Taylor Swift

In September, Kanye West apologized to Taylor Swift via Twitter.

"She had nothing to do with my issues with award shows," the "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" artist wrote. "She deserves the apology more than anyone."

West uttered a retraction of sorts Wednesday during a 1 a.m. performance at the Bowery Ballroom in New York. He stopped the concert for 10-minutes to rant about the media's scrutiny of his career.

West said he does not regret interrupting Swift's first Video Music Award win speech to champion Beyonce instead.

"When you do things like what happened last year, it's disrespectful to everyone who's creative," West said about MTV's decision to give Swift the honor. "It's a slap in the face to everyone who tries to do something real."

West implied that Swift and the VMA producers are lucky his disruption was brief.

"If I wasn't drunk, I would have been on stage longer," he said.

West compared the aftermath of the VMA incident to that of the 2005 Hurricane Katrina telethon in which he accused President Bush of not caring about black people.

West said he felt bad when people thanked him for dissing the president. "The whole time, I'm thinking, ‘That's not exactly what I wanted to say. I was emotional,'" he said. But he never set the record straight.

West said Swift handled the VMA fallout the same way. "Just as Taylor never came to my defense in any interview and rode the wave, and rode it, rode it, that's the way I rode the wave for the Bush comment," he said.

For the record, Swift did come to West's defense on the song "Innocent," which she performed on the 2010 VMAs and also appears on her "Speak Now" album. In the song, Swift lets West know that he has been forgiven. She sings, "Your string of lights is still bright to me."

During West's tirade, he also said he and Bush were exploited by "Today." The NBC program's assertion that Bush referred to West's comment as his lowest moment of his presidency is not true, Kanye argued.

"That's not what he said," West commented. "He said it's one of his lowest moments."

West accuses "Today" of purposefully taking Bush's comment out of context to boost ratings. "Because of the popularity of me they exploited that to make you watch the interview," he said, "and make you feel that he was stupider than ever to think that a rapper's comments could be his lowest moment."

West said his fifth studio album, the critically acclaimed "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy," released Monday, sold 100,000 digital copies on the first day of release.