I Love Taylor Swift, Soap Opera Villainess
The feud between Kanye West and Taylor Swift was full of drama, shifting allegiances, and cease fires—until all hell broke loose
On Friday, June 27, 1997, Kristen DiMera had all her schemes exposed on Days of Our Lives. When she first appeared in the series, she was a kind-hearted woman who loved children and was destined to be one of the series’ leading heroines. However, over the course of four years, she would eventually cheat on her blind husband, kidnap her romantic rival and hold her in a secret room, hide a miscarriage, fake a pregnancy, steal another woman’s baby, and erase a woman’s memory all so she could marry the love of her life, John Black. Soap opera fans know that it takes years, sometimes decades for secrets to be exposed, for bitter feuds to finally combust in one dramatic climax. Such has been the ongoing saga between Kanye West and Taylor Swift, which began on September 13, 2009. Their feud has been nearly eight years in the making with constant shifting allegiances and cease fires—until all hell broke loose in the most dramatic, daytime television fashion imaginable.
For a secret on a soap opera to be exposed with maximum effect, it has to occur in public. That means a hospital where someone’s paternity is revealed. A church where a wedding is about to take place. Or in 2016, the internet. Television series still necessitate that secrets are revealed in a public forum, because that is how you capture the reactions of all involved participants. You have the see the anguish, the surprise, the elation on their faces. But now, we live a world of reaction GIFs. You don’t need to see someone’s face to know how they react to drama on social media, you just need to look at which Whitney Houston, Real Housewives, or Tiffany Pollard GIF they use to convey their emotions.
But let’s discuss the etymology of “receipts.” As in, “show me the receipts,” or “I have the receipts.” The phrase came into the American pop culture lexicon due to a 2002 ABC News interview between Diane Sawyer and Whitney Houston. Intended as publicity for the forthcoming album Just Whitney, the interview ended up diving deep into Whitney’s relationship with Bobby Brown and her history of drug use. At one point, Diane asks Whitney about an alleged $730,000 drug habit. To which which Whitney responds, “Come on! $730k? I wish. I wish whoever’s making that money off of me could share it with me. No way. No way. I wanna see the receipts. From the drug dealer that I bought $730,000 worth of drugs from. I wanna see the receipts.” I. Wanna. See. The. Receipts. And from that, a phrase came to be that is still very much popular to this day. Don’t believe what someone’s saying? Ask them to show you the receipts. You think Taylor Swift has been telling lies about your husband in the streets? Arrive announcing, “I have the receipts,” like Cookie Lyon laying claim to power on Empire.
Kim’s role in this is oddly ironic. Kim is a white woman whose proximity to and appropriation of blackness allows her to play in a black menagerie whenever she chooses to put on some bronzer, butt pads, and some corn rows. But she’s still a white woman. And it was only another white woman could beat Taylor at her own game. It could never be Kanye, since the media narrative surrounding him has always been of a black male terrorizing an innocent white woman. Who would believe him? Who would believe a black woman like Nicki Minaj? Or an ex-boyfriend like Calvin with a bad history of treating exes poorly? Or Katy Perry, who seems to enjoy being petty? (After Kim’s exposé on Snapchat, Katy tweeted out the link to her new single “Rise” by writing: #RISE above it all.)
Of course, anyone who’s seen someone get exposed on a daytime sudser knows that admitting defeat is never an option. Even if there’s videotape evidence that contradicts your story, you deny, deny, deny. And that’s is what Taylor Swift did, by posting an Instagram in her own defense.
“Hennessy, it’s gonna be the death of me,” Kanye once rapped on “Bittersweet Poetry,” a bonus track from his album Graduation. Prophetically enough, two years later it’s the same liquor that Fall Out Boy’s Patrick Stump said he witnessed Kanye drinking like it was communion wine at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards. This was the night Taylor and Beyoncé were both nominated for Best Female Video. Taylor won the award, which prompted Kanye to storm the stage and utter the now-iconic phrase, “Yo Taylor, I’m really happy for you, I’ll let you finish, but Beyoncé has one of the best videos of all time. One of the best videos of all time!”
Now, my personal love of Beyoncé has led me to drain my bank account on occasion and proselytize whenever a new music video, album, or Instagram post drops, but it has never caused me to create a decade-long feud with one of America’s most beloved pop stars. I’m not Kanye West, though, so maybe it seemed like a good idea at the time. And to be fair, Beyoncé’s video was better. Kanye apologized with a blog post that evening, writing: “I’m still happy for taylor! Boooyaaawwww! you are very very talented! I gave my awards to outkast when they deserved it over me… that’s what it is!! i’m not crazy yall, i’m just real. Sorry for that! I really feel bad for taylor and i’m sincerely sorry! Much respect!!”
Despite insistence from Taylor that she would “very much like to be excluded from this narrative, one that [she] has never asked to be a part of, since 2009,” she followed the VMAs incident up by releasing the song “Innocent” that directly referenced the drama with Kanye. In a quite condescending song, she sang about the situation, “It’s okay, life is a tough crowd / Thirty two and still growin’ up now / Who you are is not what you did / You’re still an innocent.” This naturally pissed off Kanye, as it would any grown man, who’d been portrayed as the angry black man in the media and was now meant to be a doe-eyed Lennie Small who could tend to Taylor’s rabbits. He clapped back during an Access Hollywood interview where he claimed Taylor’s album Fearless didn’t deserve its Grammy of the Year Award.
Enter Kim Kardashian, fresh out of two marriages, like the soap opera, antiheroine vixen every juicy storyline needs. The Kardashian empire— birthed from the American frenzy of the O.J. Simpson trial—lured both Kanye and Taylor into its messy drama. Kim and Kanye began dating, eventually wedding in 2014, and Taylor sparked a new friendship with the two. After the three of them were seen as cozy as a fucking Archie comic at the 2015 Grammy Awards, Kanye even insinuated that he might collaborate with Taylor on a song. Little did we know, this was foreshadowing of the drama surrounding his Life of Pablo single “Famous.” He visited Ryan Seacrest’s radio show and said, “Yeah, she wants to get in the studio and we’re definitely going to go in. Any artist with an amazing point of view, perspective, fan base, I’m down to get in the studio and work. I don’t discriminate. I don’t have an elitism of music because of like how many Grammys or you know, the amount of ratings you get on an album.”
Taylor remained Kanye’s friend even as he was painted a villain in the media, sometimes for reasons of his own doing (“BILL COSBY INNOCENT !!!!!!!!!!”), sometimes because the curse of being an outspoken black male means that you are never in the right. That is, until he dropped The Life of Pablo. The album featured the song “Famous,” wherein he rapped, “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / Why? I made that bitch famous.” Kanye claimed to have gotten Taylor’s blessings on Twitter, while her camp responded: “nah.” Her official statement: “Kanye did not call for approval, but to ask Taylor to release his single ‘Famous’ on her Twitter account. She declined and cautioned him about releasing a song with such a strong misogynistic message. Taylor was never made aware of the actual lyric, ‘I made that bitch famous.’”
Flash forward to another glitzy award show, which as we’ve already established, is perfect for starting some shit on a soap opera. And start some shit Taylor did. When she won album of the year, she said: “As the first woman to win Album of the Year at the Grammys twice, I want to say to all the young women out there — there are going to be people along the way who are going to try to undercut your success or take credit for your accomplishments or your fame.”
Months later, it was finally Kim to the rescue. A heroine fighting to exonerate the love of her life, she gave an interview with GQ and said that Taylor not only knew about the song, but that Kim had video evidence. “She totally approved that. She wanted to all of a sudden act like she didn’t. I swear, my husband gets so much shit for things [when] he really was doing proper protocol and even called to get it approved. And then they sent an attorney’s letter like ‘Don’t you dare do anything with that footage,’ and asking us to destroy it.”
The weeks before someone gets blown out of the water on a soap, there’s a last-minute scramble for evidence. The tape! The documents! The photographs! Anything that will prove that someone has been lying for months. And tape is exactly what Kim produced on Sunday evening, when she took to Snapchat and uploaded the conversation that Kanye had with Taylor Swift. In the public forum of social media, for all the world to see. And that, is how you use soap opera tactics to take someone down.
And so Taylor’s Instagram post is seen as a last ditch effort to keep this entire drama under wraps, after weeks of contradictory statements from her team. In soaps, these never work out. They’re too easy to poke holes in. For one, you realize that not only celebrities have Notes as an app on their iPhone, right? I know that y’all like to use to for posting long ass essays on Twitter and Instagram that nobody wants to read, but it’s not an exclusive celebrity app. We know how to use it. Which means that we know instead of saying “notes” in yellow on your response, it says “search,” which means that you searched for this response to post it. This means that it was not the most recent note on your iPhone, and Taylor most likely wrote this response to Kim’s video long before it was ever uploaded.
Keep in mind that Taylor’s team also said she urged Kanye not to post something with a “strong misogynistic message” but on the video, Taylor tells Kanye: “I just really appreciate it. I never would’ve expect you to tell me about a line in your song.” That doesn’t sound like someone urging someone to not release a song at all. Also, while the line “I made the bitch famous” is not included on Kim’s Snapchat, Taylor must have been made aware of some iteration of it, because she says this: “You gotta tell the story the way that it happened to you and the way you experienced it. Like you obviously didn’t know who I was before that. It doesn’t matter if I sold 7 million of that album before you did that, which is what happened. You didn’t know who I was before that.” That response in no way correlates to the line “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex.” That’s a response to a line about making someone’s career, about not knowing them, hence the “you didn’t know who I was before that.”
Kanye might have excluded the phrase “that bitch” while informing Taylor he was going to say that he made her famous. But the fact remains that Taylor’s claims to have never been made aware of the song are false. And it also shows that she was presenting a very false narrative at the Grammys when she talked about people trying to take credit for accomplishments, especially since she knew in advance Kanye would be doing that. You don’t get to be a face of millennial white feminism while perpetuating the same thing your foresisters did to get white women to demand suffrage in the South — playing up the fear of blackness.
But does any of this frivolous celebrity nonsense even matter? When you expose something in a public forum, there will always be immediate responses. And just like the cast of characters witnessing a blow-up on television, multiple celebrities chimed in to insist that there are real issues going on the world that we should be focused on and not the squabbling of two rich white celebrities. But here’s the thing: It all does matter. Because try as people might to divorce celebrity from the real world, it directly influences the world that we all live in.
Portrayals of black men in the media lead to racist narratives that paint Kanye as a villain and Taylor as the white woman in distress. Putting on a show at the Grammys to become a victim in the face of a black bogeyman perpetuates stereotypes and plays into tropes that have existed since Birth of a Nation. Suddenly caring about this fight between Kim, Taylor, and Kanye doesn’t mean that black lives have stopped mattering. It doesn’t mean there’s no longer an election coming up. It means that people can have fun laughing at celebrities while also juggling the responsibilities of the real world. And you can definitely have a laugh at Taylor’s Instagram post, which is the equivalent of an unmasked Scooby-Doo ghost shouting, “And I would’ve gotten away with it too if it weren’t for you meddling Kardashians!”
Is this feud finally over? I highly doubt it. When Kristen was exposed on Days, she hatched another scheme to get her way. Kim, Kanye, and Taylor will be forever intertwined. They’ll always be asked about one another in interviews. They’ll always flare up some new drama when they have something to promote. If you don’t think Taylor has some song ready for her next album, a plan to marry Tom Hiddleston on broadcast television, or something else up her sleeve, you’re kidding yourself. And if you say you’re not excited for whatever it is, you’re a straight up liar.
You know why Kanye continues to have fans and sell out shows? He’s flawed as fuck but he owns it and it’s fascinating. There are too many cracks in the narrative for the sheen of pop’s good girl to continue. And to be honest — I’ve never loved the heroines in soap operas. I love the bad girls, the ones who do whatever it takes to get what they want. Embrace the bad girl within Taylor and make your next move.
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