Taylor Swift might be the leading international collector of glittering gal pals, but she’s also had a fair amount Bad Blood within the music industry. After Kanye stormed the stage as Taylor was accepting her Best Female Video award at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2009, Taylor was understandably pretty pissed at the self appointed protector of Beyoncé’s music video honour (Kanye thought she should have won).
It seems Tay Tay and Yeezy have managed to move forward though, with a little help from fairy godfather Jay Z. “I feel like I wasn’t ready to be friends with [West] until I felt like he had some sort of respect for me, and he wasn’t ready to be friends with me until he had some sort of respect for me — so it was the same issue, and we both reached the same place at the same time,” Swift explains in a new interview with Vanity Fair. “I became friends with Jay Z, and I think it was important, for Jay Z, for Kanye and I to get along,” she says, adding that, “Then Kanye and I both reached a place where he would say really nice things about my music and what I’ve accomplished, and I could ask him how his kid’s doing.” Presumably, T Swift thinks it goes without saying that she appreciates his music too.
Swift also comments on her hugely influential open letter to Apple Music, which prompted the streaming service to finally agree to pay artists during the 3-month free trial offered to customers. “My fears were that I would be looked at as someone who just whines and rants about this thing that no one else is really ranting about,” Swift says, adding that, “Apple treated me like I was a voice of a creative community that they actually cared about” and commenting that she, “found it really ironic that the multi-billion-dollar company reacted to criticism with humility, and the start-up with no cash flow reacted to criticism like a corporate machine.” Burn! That “start-up with no cash flow” can be none other than Spotify, whose free streaming model she vehemently disagrees with.
Elsewhere, Swift spoke about the issue of women being misrepresented in the media and pitted against each other in feuds dreamt up by the tabloids. Discussing her stage-invading girl gang, Swift explained that, “We even have girls in our group who have dated the same people,” musing that, “It’s almost like the sisterhood has such a higher place on the list of priorities for us. It’s so much more important than some guy that it didn’t work out with.”
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Photography via Jana Beamer