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From 'muse' to 'too sexy'. How Kanye West’s view of Kim Kardashian has changed in 7 years.

 

Kimye is not what it used to be.

It’s been seven years since Kim Kardashian and Kanye West got together to form the number-one celebrity couple on the planet. They’ve gifted us with internet-breaking images, weird tweets and the best, bizarrest baby names. But on an episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians earlier this month, when West criticised Kardashian for dressing ‘too sexy’, people started to question how much had changed in the relationship in those seven years.

“Kim thought she was marrying an edgy creative genius who thought outside the box and ended up with a hypocritical Republican televangelist who tells her to go back home and change,” tweeted writer Bolu Babalola. “That’s sad.”

Kim Kardashian explains to Ellen why Kanye gets upset with her Insta. Post continues below.

Video by Ellen

Let’s go back to where it all began for Kimye.

It was 2003, and West was making a music video with Brandy, who was a friend of Kardashian’s. At that stage, KUWTK was still four years off, and the rapper didn’t recognise her.

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“He was asking his friends: ‘Who is this Kim Kardajan?’” Kardashian later told Ryan Seacrest. “He didn’t know what my name was.”

The two were just friends at first, but when West saw a photo of Kardashian with Paris Hilton in Australia in 2006, it turned into something more.

“I just knew I wanted her to be my girl for a long time,” he told Seacrest.

There’s something happening in Hollywood, stars are not just turning to religion, they’re starting their own churches. The Quicky team take a peek inside the new world of the Kardashian/Jenner/West’s where Sunday sessions are the new vehicle for their brand. Post continues below.

In 2008, West convinced Kardashian to dress as Princess Leia for the pilot of a show called Alligator Boots.

“I would say this is when we first really connected,” Kardashian wrote on her website.

By this time, Kardashian had already had one marriage – to music producer Damon Thomas – behind her. In 2011, she got married again, in a TV special, to basketballer Kris Humphries. She filed for divorce 72 days later.

There was something happening between her and West.

“Right before I got married to Kris Humphries, [West and I] were talking and I just went a different direction,” Kardashian told Seacrest. “I think I had to go through that to figure out what I wanted.”

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It was after the breakup that West invited Kardashian to Paris to see his fashion show. That’s when they started dating.

“He jokes that he put on this whole fashion show just to get a date with me,” she remembers. “I swear from the moment I landed, I fell madly in love with him and I thought, ‘Oh my God, why didn’t I do this sooner?’ Like, this is what real life is like – love and fun and real support.”

 

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West rapped about Kardashian in his song “Cold”.

“And I’ll admit, I had fell in love with Kim/Around the same time she had fell in love with him/Well that’s cool, baby girl, do ya thang/Lucky I ain’t had Jay drop him from the team.”

West, at that time, was riding high on the success of best-selling albums like My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. He’d had controversies – claiming President George W. Bush didn’t care about black people following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and interrupting Taylor Swift at the 2009 MTV Awards – but he was seen as one of the greatest musicians of the 21st century.

Kardashian and West’s relationship went public in April 2012.

Even in that first year, some fans were concerned that West was too controlling. A segment on KUWTK showed West and his stylist going through Kardashian’s wardrobe and giving it a makeover.

At the time, Kardashian said West was inspiring her to be “a little bit more of an individual”. But years later she admitted how she really felt when she saw “all my amazing shoes that I loved” in a pile to be thrown out.

“I started crying,” she told Live With Kelly And Michael.

Things moved fast. Before the year was out, the couple announced they were pregnant with their first child. In October of the following year, West spent $US3 million on a proposal which involved a baseball field in San Francisco, a 50-member orchestra and a 15-carat diamond ring.

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“PLEEEASE MARRY MEEE!!!” the scoreboard read.

Soon afterwards, West featured Kardashian, topless, in the video for his song “Bound 2”.

“And yes, you could argue that this music video is basically a softcore porno about Kanye West making wuv to Kim Kardashian on a motorcycle,” Entertainment Weekly wrote at the time.

As late as March 2016, West was still totally cool with sexy Kardashian. When everyone had an opinion on her controversial nude pics, West shared one of them on Twitter, with one word: “Muse”.

It was in November that year that things started to change. West was hospitalised for what was reported as “temporary psychosis”, and around that time, he found Jesus.

“The most space that I had to think is when I went to the hospital,” West told Zane Lowe last week. “One of the things that happened when I went to the hospital is I started reading the Bible and I started writing and copying out Bible verses.”

West now leads Sunday Service, a gospel-rap group that performs around the nation. He’s just released the album is Jesus Is King.

As well as being born again, Kanye has been expressing a lot of politically conservative views over the past few years. He’s claimed “slavery is a choice”, and he’s visited the White House to have lunch with President Donald Trump.

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Kardashian admitted in an interview with Alec Baldwin last year that she found West’s political activity “exhausting”, but she let him be “who he wants to be”.

“I let him have his own views and opinions, even if they’re different from mine.”

Clearly Kardashian’s not prepared to let West’s opinions override her own, as she proves in the KUWTK episode where he criticises her Thierry Mugler dress for the Met Gala.

“I went through this transition where being a rapper, looking at all these girls and looking at my wife, like, ‘Oh my girl needs to be just like the other girls showing their body off,’” he says in the episode.

“I didn’t realise that that was affecting my soul and my spirit as someone who is married and the father of now… about to be four kids.”

 

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Kim hits back: “You built me up to be this sexy person and confidence and all this, and just because you’re on a journey and transformation doesn’t mean I’m in the same spot with you.”

In the Zane Lowe interview last week, West talked about the episode.

“I suffer and I appreciate the suffering because we can feel a little bit of what Jesus experienced, but I suffer on social media,” he explained, sort of.

West went on to say that he and Kardashian had “a successful celebrity marriage” that he described as a “God bond”.

“Equally yoked,” he added. “Someone to complain to and someone to grow with as we grow and raise our children.”

Ah, Kimye. How you’ve changed.


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