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CMU Beef Of The Week #311: Katy Perry v Taylor Swift

By | Published on Friday 24 June 2016

Katy Perry

I previously said I’d carry on with the EU theme in this column as long as Brexit was still a thing. But seriously, it’s too depressing to do so now that we’re actually stuck with it all for the next decade or so. And so, like all the promises made by the Leave Campaign, it turns out I was not telling the truth. Here’s some other non-story I cobbled together for your mild entertainment.

Oh, you thought it was gone, washed away with the rain of new gossip. But no. It’s back. The feud between Katy Perry and Taylor Swift is back.

As you will no doubt remember, this all stems from an interview Taylor Swift gave to Rolling Stone, in which she said that her song ‘Bad Blood’ was about another female musician who had “basically tried to sabotage an entire arena tour”. TMZ claims that this was all to do with a disagreement between the two singers over backing dancers.

It all blew up again when Perry wrote a tweet that was assumed to be siding with Nicki Minaj, after Swift entirely misjudged a response to comments Minaj had made about the nominees for Video Of The Year at the MTV VMAs last year. “Finding it ironic to parade the ‘pit-women-against-other-women argument’ about as one immeasurably capitalises on the take down of a woman”, wrote Perry, which the world took to be a reference to ‘Bad Blood’.

Prior to that, there’d been a whole thing about Kerry Perry planning to perform her own diss track at her Super Bowl half time show, which turned out not to be true then, or later when it was claimed that she had an anti-Swift single in the works.

Neither artist has ever explicitly come out and said they’re actually having a feud, mind. Though Swift has come out and accused the media of whipping these things up in order to have something to write about. Journalists? Invent feuds between musicians – particularly female musicians – to fill space? Never.

No, because now there’s conclusive proof that the Perry/Swift feud is real. And it smells lovely. Katy Perry recently unveiled her latest perfume. And what is that perfume called? It is called ‘Mad Love’. As in, “Now we’ve got bad blood, it used to be mad love”, aka the lyrics of Swift’s ‘Bad Blood’ song.

Pretty conclusive, huh? What better way to get back at someone than through commerce? Every time Swift smells that fragrance, she’ll be like, “Ugh, damn you Perry. Damn you to hell. We sure do have bad blood”. And every time she performs ‘Bad Blood’, or it plays on the radio, or someone listens to it on Apple Music, it’ll be like an advert for Katy Perry’s latest smell.

It’s a business plan that’s worked well for Perry in the past. Who now can hear ‘Killer Queen’ by Queen without thinking of Perry’s perfume of the same name? I sure can’t.

Now, you might say that ‘mad love’ is a phrase that was commonly used before Taylor Swift ever thought of putting it in a song. But you’re forgetting that as far as Taylor Swift is concerned, she owns all the words she has ever spoken. The fact that her attempts to legally confirm this have never worked is a daily source of immense anger for her. Probably. So think how she feels now that she knows that Katy Perry basically owns two of her words. Two of them!

Swift may also be annoyed that she didn’t think to use the two word lyric for one of her own fragrances, which all have awful names, like ‘Incredible Things’ and ‘Wonderstruck Enchanted’. ‘Wonderstruck Enchanted’ was Swift’s follow-up to ‘Wonderstruck’, if you were wondering. Just like ‘Mad Love’ is Perry’s follow-up to ‘Mad Potion’.

Oh but the feud. The feuding. The terrible, terrible feuding.

Like I said, fuck Brexit.



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