Taylor Swift Raps With T-Pain, Rocks With Def Leppard At CMTs

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T-Swizzy, or Taylor Swift as she's occasionally called, was the star of last night's CMT Music Awards in Nashville, winning two trophies, performing with Def Leppard and making her rap debut with a little help from T-Pain. The "Thug Story" video — a clip worthy of a Saturday Night Live Digital Short — that opened the show saw T-Swizzy poking fun at her good-girl image by rhyming, "I'm so gangsta, you can find me baking cookies at night/You out clubbin', but I just made Caramel Delight." Other qualities that make our recent cover star a "thug": her ability to knit and the fact that she still lives with her parents. Swift reportedly wrote the lyrics for the track, with T-Pain contributing his trademark (and in this case, hilarious) Auto-Tune harmonies.

(Check out photos of Swift, Def Leppard, Kid Rock and more onstage and backstage at the CMTs.)

Brad Paisley led the winners' list with three awards, and Swift took home both Video of the Year and Female Video of the Year for "Love Story" from her blockbuster 2008 disc Fearless. Kid Rock also walked off with a trophy, scoring the "Wide Open Country video buckle" for "All Summer Long." Still, it was Swift who owned the night, taking the stage twice more before event ended. Midway through the ceremony, Swift returned to perform her hit "You Belong To Me," and she was back again to close out the show with her heroes, Def Leppard.

Swift, who previously collaborated with Def Leppard on a Crossroads special, reiterated her love of the band during one of her acceptance speeches: "I want to thank CMT for letting me live so many of my dreams this year. I got to sing with my heroes. Def Leppard, I love you guys so much." When the band took the stage, Swift grabbed the microphone, fist-bumped frontman Joe Elliott and took the lead on a rendition of their barroom classic "Pour Some Sugar On Me."

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• Photos: Taylor Swift Onstage and Backstage
• Taylor Swift Photo Gallery

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Song Stories

“Karma Chameleon”

Culture Club | 1983

Boy George has said this song was about standing by what you believe in. However, at the time, he was involved in a secret affair with Culture Club drummer Jon Moss. "Now people can understand the songs better," he said. "They were written about my relationship with Jon, and they were also written about being a gay man in a homophobic world." The lines "If I listen to your lies, would you say/I'm a man without conviction/I'm a man who doesn't know how to sell a contradiction," described his life at the time, he said. "I was selling this big lie."

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