Taylor Swift’s
This post originally APPEARED on stereogum.com
The Kanye West/Taylor Swift thing kept happening for so long. It’s still happening, or at least its aftershocks are still happening. Fifteen years ago, West drunkenly wandered onstage at the VMAs to tell Swift that the award she’d just won should’ve gone to Beyoncé instead. He was right, but he was also a dick about it, and he didn’t consider the idea that nobody should ever care about who wins an MTV Video Music Award. That live-televised shattered-glass moment continues to reverberate culturally. We can’t escape it.
This year, both Kanye West and Taylor Swift have made #1 hits — a surprise in the former case, a pure inevitability in the latter. Also, Swift released a song called “thanK you aIMee,” one of the many bonus tracks that she included on the extended version of her already-crazy-long blockbuster album The Tortured Poets Department. She had a reason for stylizing it like that: The capital letters spell out “KIM,” as in Kanye West’s ex-wife. Later on, she released an acoustic version retitled “thank You aimEe,” now signaling that the song was meant for West himself. (“thanK you aIMee” peaked at #23.)
So: It’s not over yet. It might never end. This one little offhand awards-show moment kicked up such a media shitstorm that it came to affect both artists’ careers in ways that nobody could’ve predicted. In that first moment, Kanye West was the villain, the guy who Barack Obama labeled as a “jackass.” Today, West is the villain again, to the extent that this story can even have a villain anymore. Once upon a time, though, Taylor Swift became the villain. This was new. She’d never been a villain before. She didn’t know how to handle it. She wanted to be excluded from the narrative, but that wasn’t up to her. Instead, she built the narrative into an album launch, one that would’ve been perilously scrutinized even without all the Kanye stuff.
Swift had to figure out a way to follow 1989, the mega-huge album that launched her to complete pop dominance. Swift was already wildly popular before 1989, but that album was something else. It had three different #1 singles, and it took Swift out of arenas and into stadiums. It’s always hard to figure out what to do after the moment when you first catch the zeitgeist in a chokehold. Maybe the Kanye situation gave Swift the material that she needed. It’s definitely the story that fuels “Look What You Made Me Do,” a song that became a huge hit even though seemingly everyone acknowledged that it’s mid at best.
