Nicki Minaj vs. Taylor Swift drama, Katy Perry joins

[Spock 20,290]

That's true, but there is a bit of karma for Taylor, because she has invoked feminism in much the same way to dismiss people who criticize her songwriting and themes. As if a man who wrote diss songs about his exes and was emotionally vulnerable would be universally applauded.

Gaga and Katy are both feminist and IMHO have never said anything unreasonable on the topic, but Taylor on the subject is too victimy and self-serving.

Yeah, she shouldn't have used that carebear comeback she's been using since the Golden Globes when Tina and Amy came for her. I guess she learned that now but at least she's starting to reply to the shade so there's at least that

[Kacey Elizabeth 900]

You're right but her purpose was not to take down a woman, her purpose was to make profit of a bad situation that ended up in a song. Yes, she might have not acted in the most mature way but come on, at this point and in this matter Katy's opinion is certainly unnecessary.

Taylor literally tried to humiliate Katy, ruin and demonize her image, and tried to turn the entire media and industry against her with the Bad Blood song and the video, because of only THREE DANCERS (who used to work with Katy first) left her but told her while they were signing with her that they don't want to sign for the entire tour and that if Katy ever goes to tour again, they'll go back to her. If it was about a serious thing and actual betrayal, I would've understand, but thing here is that Taylor is overreacting and is being way too sensitive.

[NewYorkCity 10,515]

Shirley Manson join in too.

so much tea. 

[Spock 20,290]

That backlash in 2012 was nothing. Strawberry Blond said it best. It was just a bump minor on the road. As a Gaga fan, you should know what real backlash is. Also, I don't recommend you to get your hopes up for TS6. 

I don't know which caved you or SB lived on but that is not true. Not even going to waste my time explaining. Also, you don't need to remind me of the Gaga backlash thanks. Just becase I also stan for Taylor doesn't mean I don't know **** about Gaga, I mean, I have been on GGD since before BTW ffs. Also, I didn't know you were a magican who can predict the future

[AgusPop 4,064]

And @DillonTwink,   @Spock is not a little monster, on the contrary.    He does not represent us at all. He is here only for Taylor.

I am a huge Gaga Fan and I think Taylor is always playing the victim card and she is fake.

[craig 680]

I hope it stays going on until the gp learn that there is a lot of racism that goes on in award shows like this and the Grammy's.   I feel like they are learning tho considering all the articles

Everyone not already on that train will just see Nicki as playing the "race card." In fact, some blacks fans of Lil Kim and Beyonce are calling Nicki out for that on twitter. A millionaire who only gets 2 noms instead of 3, what a poster girl for oppression.

It will damage Taylor's attempts to be a hero with the feminist left, so she loses too. Some blacks on twitter saying she's a typical white feminist.

 

[j92184 483]

OK, good luck with that, maybe you'll let the light in 

 

 Why do you like this .gif? I have to watch it 5 times everytime you post it just to see her reaction

[LePetitGAGABLover 21,234]

Why is everyone being mean to @Spock ?

[retroglamx 5,099]

Taylor literally tried to humiliate Katy, ruin and demonize her image, and tried to turn the entire media and industry against her with the Bad Blood song and the video, because of only THREE DANCERS (who used to work with Katy first) left her but told her while they were signing with her that they don't want to sign for the entire tour and that if Katy ever goes to tour again, they'll go back to her. If it was about a serious thing and actual betrayal, I would've understand, but thing here is that Taylor is overreacting and is being way too sensitive.

Based on your username and avatar all I'm going to say is that if anyone is overreacting and being way too sensitive, that person is Onika Tanya Maraj not Taylor Alison Swift. 

[Spock 20,290]

I didn't. I meant Taylor Swift lovers or Katy haters on here who'd swallow anything just so that they don't have to defend the other person. Unless that person would be Gaga, since we're on a Gaga forum. THAT was my point.

So once again, you have twisted my words and tried to make me look like a Gaga hater or a Taylor hater. I don't even hate Taylor. I like 1989, lol. I like her feminism speech on that French chat show, would I know that if I was a hater? No! I am just very confused as to why you cannot see that Taylor is clearly in the wrong here. If it was Gaga, I wouldn't be defending her on that one. Taylor is wrong and using her position as the victim once again, to benefit her career. Open your eyes, or are they glued to Taylors shiny body suits?

I'm not twisting anything lmao. Frankly I don't care that you're not a Taylor hater. And, besides saying that Taylor was right in answering to Nicki, I said that her comeback was weak. So read again because I never defended what she said, besides saying she was right in replying. So please get of my dick.

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And @DillonTwink,   @Spock is not a little monster, on the contrary.    He does not represent us at all.

I am a huge Gaga Fan and I think Taylor is always playing the victim card and is fake.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I guess we don't have to acknowledge ha then if she's not a little monster 

He can crash and burn out on his own in the thread I guess

 

I'm a huge Gaga fan (I've had meltdowns in 2013 which I'm sure can be found somewhere ) and I know Gaga likes Taylor but Taylor did not have to get involved and in doing so pitted herself against a woman, and Katy getting involved just tops it so I'm happy the right people are winning 

[Morphine Prince 101,806]

Cringing at the people defending Nicki. Stop embarrassing yourselves. Nicki is victimizing herself because she didn't get what she wanted. It's NOT about race seeing all these black artists are nominated. If you fail to see that then... just carry on. You can't force someone to see things how they are. The blind will remain blind. 

 

[Spock 20,290]

Why is everyone being mean with @Spock ?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[jojuun 4,159]

Further reading for those interested:

- http://jezebel.com/taylor-swift-inserts-herself-into-nicki-minajs-vma-mome-1719394891

- http://gawker.com/taylor-swift-is-not-your-friend-1717745581

Not normally sites I would link to, but seeing as the whole World has decided to collapse around us, they actually are making good sensible points in these articles...

YAAAAAAAS! OH MY GOD! I am posting that Gawker article in here. It needs to be read, especially by Spock!

"Heidi Klum struts down a runway and for a moment the stretch appears to ominously resemble a gang plank. At the end of Klum’s long walk waits a tall, thin woman with gleaming white teeth, giddily anticipating a grabby, waist-level embrace between them. Klum, a seasoned runway model, side-steps to the music once or twice, shuffling her feet to the right—one-two—and then to the left—one-two—and with every step, she looks like she’s slowing down, delaying her arrival to the stage’s finish, where she’ll be left to fend for herself in the loose hungry limbs of twenty-five-year-old Taylor Swift: pop star, diva, immaculate bestie.

It is at once crystal-clear and infuriatingly inexplicable why Heidi Klum—42-year-old mother of four and semi-retired supermodel—is on stage at a Taylor Swift concert in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Klum is dressed in dark jeans, a black-and-white tank top, and pointy striped stilettos and she looks incredible, buoyant. She and Swift embrace, but it is fleeting, and the lull in the crowd indicates that this Swiftian performance art—“Here is my pretty acquaintance”—is not good entertainment. Models may be nice to look at, sure, but they don’t actually do anything, and when a ticket to see Taylor Swift perform can skyrocket into the hundreds of dollars, this isn’t what the crowd had in mind when they carpooled to MetLife Stadium for an evening packed with teenage yearnings and catharsis for former heartbreaks. I assume a large faction of the younger set in attendance doesn’t even know who Klum is.

The air hangs as the song “Style” plays on, but Swift isn’t dumb. Without letting two more stale beats pass, the performer alleviates the awkwardness by shrieking into the mic, “Please welcome to the 1989 runway the World Cup-winning U.S. Women’s National Team!” and within seconds the memory of Klum, a woman who we were previously supposed to be overjoyed to have seen, has been wiped from the minds of all 60,000 attendees as the 23 members of the victorious soccer team march down the catwalk in the direction of Taylor. The team, dressed in their jerseys and floral shorts, is waving two enormous American flags and carrying the golden World Cup trophy like a beacon. The crowd—myself included—cannot get enough of the bubbling sight. When Christie Rampone makes it to the end of the stage with the World Cup in hand, she lets Taylor Swift hold it. A few moments later, in between group hugs and jerky dance moves, Taylor demands, “Can I hold it again?!”

In a text conversation with two female friends later that night, one of them slyly notes, “Whoever’s idea it was to bring to the USWNT on stage at a Taylor Swift concert should get a raise.”

Swift’s 1989 tour is full of confusing, unscripted, and clumsily perfect moments like this—moments that drag on for far too long and feel clinically, icily intentional. When I saw Swift perform a few Fridays ago at MetLife, I was surprised to walk out of the venue at almost midnight after nearly two hours of video projections, poor gyrating, and tiresome, inarticulate pre-song speeches. During a particularly long one, the songwriter laid out her “rules for friendship.”

“Number one,” she said, holding out a nail-bitten finger lacquered with gold polish. “You have to like me.”

“And number two,” the second finger raised. “You have to want to spend time with me.”

The point Swift was trying to make was that the 60,000 people who had come to MetLife Stadium that night were now her friends because they obsequiously met both obligations for Friendship with Taylor Swift. But what she didn’t explain was what’s in it for people whobecome friends with her. One presumes Swift thinks getting to be friends with Taylor Swift is a good enough bargain, but real friendship is not, after all, a one-way street. While Taylor finds decorating herself with women besties to be a surefire method for finding the approval as a queen that she’s always wanted, one has to wonder what’s in it for the women flanking her thin frame. No one doubts why Taylor Swift asks Heidi Klum to walk the 1989 runway, but it’s a mystery why Heidi Klum says yes.

The reviews of the 1989 tour have been overwhelmingly positive in that cracked-smile way that makes it seem like every writer was forced to write with a gun to his or her head. They read like press releases at best and cult scripture at worse, and there is hardly a trace anywhere of any dissenting opinion, specifically anything that calls out Swift’s current co-opting of capital-f Feminism as a self-promotional tool. Is it possible that we’ve really become so dumb as to not know anymore what is simply just part of the pop mechanism and what is actually worthy of the hyperbolic pandering? 
 

It’s surprising to see smart people talk about Swift with such breathlessly positive overtures, not only because—like pop stars before her and pop stars after her—her music is simple and unfussy and infused with inane platitudes, but also because there appears to be something more opportunistic and sinister at play. When Taylor Swift does the mega-pop stardom act, she does it to the tilt. Swift has to be the person with the prettiest friends, the biggest records, the most popular and successful and groanworthily obvious boyfriend. The underdog narrative that the Swift machine has built is one of forced falsehoods; Swift is not coming from behind. She’s been ahead since she started. And watching her collect best friends during a moment in history when womanhood is finally beginning to feel valued does not only feel uncomfortable—it feels evil.

Take, for example, the cover story that Time ran on Taylor in November of last year, right after the release of 1989. In many ways, it’s the perfect profile of Swift because it is full of quotes that reveal exactly what her motives are when it comes to her career. Alongside open letters to Apple and missives on the state of the music industry, Swift’s fairy godmother, good-girl, best-friend vibe comes off as nothing more than what it is: a decent put-on. Here’s a quote to sit with:

“With Beats Music and Rhapsody,” Swift says, naming two competing services, “you have to pay for a premium package in order to access my albums. And that places a perception of value on what I’ve created. On Spotify, they don’t have any settings or any kind of qualifications for who gets what music. I think that people should feel that there is a value to what musicians have created, and that’s that. This shouldn’t be news right now. It should have been news in July, when I went out and stood up and said I’m against it in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.”

A very relatable 25-year-old musician who cares passionately about the artform of making music as a creative and loving endeavor, wouldn’t you say?

A quote from Carly Simon:

“I wouldn’t compare her to Joni Mitchell, Carole King or me. Onstage she’s a showman, sort of like Elton John.” Simon has recently purchased Swift’s old tour bus, since she doesn’t care much for flying. She says Swift gave her a discount (“the price you’d charge your sister”) and even left all her linens onboard.

How benevolent and kind for her to give Simon a discount on her tour bus.

On her name:

Swift likes to tell a story about how she came to be named Taylor. Well, she likes to tell two. The first is that she was named for James Taylor, the gentle “Fire and Rain” singer whom her parents adored. And the other: “My mom named me Taylor because she thought that I would probably end up in corporate business–my parents are both finance people–and she didn’t want any kind of executive, boss, manager to see if I was a girl or a boy if they got my résumé.”

This last excerpt shows exactly the part of Taylor’s persona that doesn’t get talked about enough: she is a ruthless, publicly capitalist pop star. To think of her as womanhood incarnate is to trick oneself into forgetting about “Bad Blood” and “Better Than Revenge.” Swift isn’t here to help women—she’s here to make bank. Seeing her on stage cavorting with World Cup winners and supermodels was not a win for feminism, but a win for Taylor Swift. Her plan—to be as famous and as rich as she can possibly be—is working, and by using other women as tools of her self-promotion, she is distilling feminism for her own benefit.

On the Tuesday following the concert, after I’d had a few days to properly meditate on the performative feminism that Taylor Swift was shoving in my face, I was notified to the existence of a new newsletter called Lenny. A long hm-what-would-you-call-this-oh-I-know-press-releaseon BuzzFeed explored what will soon be Lena Dunham’s next big project, an email newsletter about feminism that positioned itself as “Goop meets Grantland” or “Rookie’s Big Sister.” The project, as editor-in-chief Jessica Grose told the pub, will explore the idea of our current understanding of feminism: “The internet feminism conversation can be very circular and limiting and exclusive,” she said. “And it saddens me to see that a lot of the competition is about saying ‘you’re not feminist enough’: trying to kick people out of feminism rather than bring them in. And Lenny is an opportunity to say, ‘There are many different types of feminisms, and we can work together.’”

Grose is not wrong on that front, and while another source for women to talk about feminism seems exhausting, perhaps the more the whirlpool swirls, the further we’ll move forward with our conversations and the more progress we’ll make as a gender. And the idea that women are getting kicked out of feminism for not being feminist enough is—praise be—a truth we must all acknowledge. There are different kinds of feminism and inclusivity is essential.

But what do we do then with someone like Taylor Swift? White, rich, powerful, thin, and outwardly clueless to the ways in which she manipulates? I often have conversations with my female friends about the two sides of feminism: the complimentary, bestie feminism—the kind that Swift is currently selling—and the cutthroat, realistic, we-exist-in-this-male-world-too feminism, the kind that expects women to act to standards that have already been set for us, and to do so by acting better and stronger and in alignment with each other. I think that neither are necessarily “wrong,” though I do often find myself on the latter side of the fence. I trust that my female friends will have their **** together without me fawning all over them like they are helpless lambs, and I pray that they feel same about me.

The conclusion that Lindsay Zoladz, a close friend of mine with whom I attended the Taylor Swift concert, came to in her live review of the 1989 tour is that, you know, even if she’s misguided, Taylor Swift showing off her women friends is better than the alternative: “By the end of the night, I was feeling pretty good about the state of girlhood in 2015 if Taylor Swift is its most powerful spokeswoman. The message isn’t perfect — though I’m sure [Karlie] Kloss and [Lily] Aldridge are lovely people, I’m not quite sure if surrounding yourself with a squad of literal supermodels is the most effective way to cure your fan base of Instagram envy — but her heart is in the right place.” Remember the female pop star catfighting of the ‘90s and ‘00s? Swift’s feminism is something of the positive inverse to that.

And it’s true—just like Grose, Zoladz’s take is that the bigger and better and more public we are about our feminism in all the ways that we understand it, the more power we will wield. But there are notes to Swift’s takeover that feel like they will always have a net-negative rather than positive for women growing up in our already complicated world. I was an anxious, insecure teen girl once, and probably would have been a Taylor Swift fan then, had she been around. But instead I was raised on the messiness of the Spice Girls, the brashness of No Doubt, the open playfulness of Missy Elliot. Taylor Swift may as well be a man for all the progress she’s making for womanhood in comparison.

Lena Dunham said her experience on stage with Swift’s model friends made her feel chubby and short, and you have to wonder if someone in Dunham’s position feels that way, preteens and young women watching all this immaculate perfection probably feel even worse. A huge part of growing up female means battling with feelings of inadequacy, loneliness, and acceptance—of oneself and next to other women—and if the biggest model for that womanhood right now can’t even acknowledge intersectional feminism without getting aggressive and barbed, then is she really working for empowerment of women? Or is her priority empowering Taylor Swift?

On the Jumbotron back at MetLife, one of Swift’s guitarists comes forward, a man with a round paunch and a “cool rock guy” look, and with his face scrunched into a John Mayerian s-x grunt, he begins to shred out a meaty little solo. It goes on for way too long, no one pays attention, his presence and image feels foreign and out of place. Who invited this man to the tour? Is he part of the girl squad? He looks like Swift’s divorced uncle. He does a few hammer-ons and makes a few more pained rock faces. He is old, the crowd is bored, and anxiety builds for the return of Taylor to run around giddily in her tight little skirt.

If female empowerment was really so important to Swift as a pop star, she’d bring to the stage her astrophysicist friends, she’d have an all-female backing band like Charli XCX, she’d give speeches about intersectionality instead of “how to not feel damaged,” or maybe—if none of that sounds up her alley or workable for her current scheme to success—she’d just relax a little. There are already enough pressures for our gender to deal with—the exaggerated kingdom-building is only going to create and aggravate more anxiety.

When the man’s solo ended and he dutifully backed himself into a corner, the show returned to its regularly scheduled programming, a stadium tour that was both fun, simple, and full of buoyant singalongs. After all, no one would ever say that Taylor Swift’s hits aren’t catchy. But when I was walking out of the stadium later that night, I kept flashing back to the man and his guitar solo. If Swift really believed in what she was shilling—this feminism so huge that her stage seems bound to break from all the women she’s rallied to fit snugly under her wings—she would be deliberate about making moments like this—a backup rock guy shredding on a solo—symbolize something. But that would take real work. And when you’re Taylor Swift, who has the time?

[Tumblr 1,846]

 Why do you like this .gif? I have to watch it 5 times everytime you post it just to see her reaction

I'll stop sis, I just love the gif