There's Nothing Embarrassing About Obsessing Over Taylor Swift & Kim Kardashian's Public Feud
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It was Roman poet Juvenal who first said, “Two things only the people anxiously desire—bread and circuses” as a criticism of the layman’s priority for fun and food over more pressing intellectual and political pursuits. Take the phrase and make it carb-free (green juice and circuses?) and you have an encapsulation of 2016 and—more accurately—the entirety of human history.
Sunday night, Twitter exploded after Kim Kardashian posted several videos to Snapchat that proved, through a recorded phone call, that Taylor Swift approved the lyrics to Kanye West’s “Famous” despite publicly claiming otherwise.
Kim has been defending her husband for months, since around the time that Taylor, surrounded by her team of male producers, used her platform at the Grammys to subtweet West and call him a sexist. In the following months, both Kim and Kanye have insisted repeatedly that Swift knew full well that Kanye had recorded the lyric “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex/ Why, I made that bitch famous”—and that she had even given her blessing, at least up until his use of the phrase “that bitch.” Therefore, Swift’s feigned offense seemed to be merely a PR stunt to demonize Kanye and promote her own image as a perpetual victim. (Thinking you can outmaneuver Kris Jenner’s progeny would prove to be a fatal mistake in Swift’s generally impenetrable PR strategy.)
The same night Kim released the Snaps, Taylor followed up with a statement of her own—though considering the receipts Kim had just brought to the table, it felt about as tactically useful as responding to a nuclear bomb with a potato cannon.
As my hero Real Housewives of Orange County’s Heather Dubrow once told a flailing Alexis Bellino during a particularly tense reunion show, “When everyone’s telling you you’re dead, it’s time to lie down.” Taylor has, possibly for the first time, shown her ass and rather than picking up the pieces and moving on, she’s flailing to find a new way to shift blame. Her speech at the Grammys didn’t once hit on derogatory, sexist terms. Instead, it focused on Kanye’s assertion that he made her famous:
“I want to say to all the young women out there, there are going to be people along the way that will try to undercut your success or take credit for your accomplishments or your fame, but if you just focus on the work and you don’t let those people sidetrack you, someday when you get where you’re going, you’ll look around and you’ll know that it was you and the people who love you that put you there and that will be the greatest feeling in the world.”If this is our distraction circus, then Taylor Swift has—for years— been our ringmaster.