Ever since her album 1989 was released to record-breaking sales back in October, Taylor Swift’s dominance in the world of pop music has gone unquestioned.
With her string of successful singles, her stylish good looks and her bubbly personality, Taylor has won over even the most hardened of Swift-haters in recent months, and her coterie of famous gal pals seems to serve as evidence that the singer is as likable behind the scenes as she is on stage.
But there’s a dark side to Taylor’s success.
The girl who became famous writing scathing diss songs about her exes is still there.
Despite all her incredible success, it seems that Taylor’s nagging insecurity remains, and it sometimes rears its ugly head in surprising ways.
With the release of the single “Bad Blood,” Taylor basically declared war against Katy Perry. What started as an amusing feud between rival pop stars quickly veered into Mean Girl overkill territory with the “Bad Blood” music video.
The clip seemed to be Taylor’s way of parading her A-list friends in front of Perry as a kind of implicit queen bee threat.
The video is Taylor’s most popular to date, but in some ways, the approach backfired. Many felt that Taylor had overplayed her hand and demonstrated some serious hypocrisy.
Swift has long been vocal about her feminist philosophy and her belief in the importance of women in show business supporting one another.
(She basically told Tina Fey and Amy Poehler to go to hell when they dared to crack a joke at her expense while hosting the Golden Globes.)
Unfortunately, as she proved this week with her angry tweets targeted at Nicki Minaj, Taylor’s brand of feminism only applies when she’s the victim.
With the Perry situation, Taylor has demonstrated that she’s more than willing to go nuclear when she perceives a threat from another woman, and many are now calling her out on it.
Perry subtly slammed Swift on Twitter during her brief feud with Minaj, but she’s not the only one who’s second-guessing Taylor’s sincerity and commitment to feminism these days.
Think-pieces with titles like “Taylor Swift is Not Your Friend” and “The Inevitable Taylor Swift Backlash Has Begun” have begun popping up online, and many who assumed that Taylor had won the war against Katy and proven her invincibility are now beginning to wonder if they weren’t simply fooled by a cunning self-promoter.
While Taylor huffed and puffed (with an eternal smile on her face, of course) Katy played it cool and quietly earned a spot as the highest-paid entertainer of the past year.
We’re not saying the tide of public opinion has turned against Taylor. She’ll always have an army of devoted supporters in her corner.
We’re simply saying that when evaluating the ongoing feud between Swift and Perry, don’t count Katy out just yet. She’s got the eye of the tiger, and she might eventually go in for the kill.
