Time I’m available for hire… I feel like you need me? I’m very expensive.
This is an insane profile. It’s insane that Time Magazine sent their staff Swiftie to interview Taylor Swift and they got literally zero juice. Where’s the dirt? Where’s the intrigue?
This would have been a great article if it had taken place six years ago. This profile spends more time recounting the exhausted story of Taylor Swift’s now-infamous phone call with Kanye West, than it does discussing Taylor’s year of achievements.
I would have loved to have learned what the creative process was for developing this tour. How did she approach covering her entire catalog worth of music in one show? What does she have planned next? You won’t find any insight into that here.
Instead, she’s lamenting over how her “career was taken from her” due to backlash following the leaked phone call with Kanye West where he tells her he wants to mention her in his song Famous. On the phone call, he tells her the lyric, minus the mention of the word “bitch”, and she kinda, sorta, agrees to it.
But when the song came out, she very publicly expressed that she was not okay with the song. Then, Kim Kardashian released a recording of the phone call where Taylor seemingly agrees— only for a longer, unedited, version of the recording to come out years later where it’s clear Taylor wasn’t given all the details.
Six years later, I still have a hard time believing that she was so broken and down bad because of the addition of the word “bitch” considering…. She knew it was a Kanye song, and that word is frequently thrown around in rap & hiphop. Regardless— how much more interesting would it have been if she had discussed what it feels like to be able to bury the hatchet, not let negativity drag you down, move through controversy and succeed, etcetera.
Taylor has had the most commercially successful year of her life, she’s broken just about every record, why does she need to mull over this? Sure, bring it up in therapy, dish to your friends, blow up the group chat, but why would she take this moment, where she is receiving such a high honor for her accomplishments, to bring up this again?
The obvious answer to me is that she didn’t want to talk about the break up. Or her rendez-vous with Matty Healy followed by her random song release with Ice Spice as a wildly transparent cover up. This article would have been a million times more insightful if the writer had picked up on that.
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