Has Taylor Swift accused Katy Perry of “sabotaging [her] entire arena tour”? The two singers appear to be trading barbs in the lead-up to Swift’s new album, which allegedly includes a diss song about her former friend.
The track is called Bad Blood, and as Swift told Rolling Stone, it was written about a major female artist whom she “declines to name”.
“For years, I was never sure if [this singer and I] were friends or not,” Swift recalled. “She would come up to me at awards shows and say something and walk away, and I would think, ‘Are we friends, or did she just give me the harshest insult of my life?’”
Last year, Swift claims, her mysterious frenemy “did something so horrible”. She added: “It wasn’t even about a guy! It had to do with business. She basically tried to sabotage an entire arena tour. She tried to hire a bunch of people out from under me … I was like, ‘Oh, we’re just straight-up enemies.’”
Internet sleuths were quick to suggest that Swift was talking about Perry. The two have spent recent years as awards-show peers, and both dated John Mayer. More pertinently, dancer Lockhart Brownlie stated last December that he and two other dancers had quit Swift’s Red tour to dance with Perry on her Prism dates. “I was with Taylor for the first six months … but then Katy contacted us,” he told Australia’s Examiner newspaper. “We weren’t really dancing in Taylor’s tour anyway so I had got a little bored, and I really wanted to do a promo tour.”
The plot thickened on Tuesday, with Katy Perry at her most passive-aggressive: “Watch out for the Regina George in sheep’s clothing,” she tweeted, referencing the meanest of the mean girl characters in Mark Waters’s 2004 film Mean Girls. Swift has yet to reply.
Then again, her music may speak for her. Due out 27 October, Swift’s fifth album, 1989, will include Bad Blood, as well as four songs about ex-boyfriend Harry Styles. “I know people are going to obsess over who [Bad Blood is] about … [and] I know people will make it this big girl-fight thing,” Swift said. “But there’s a reason there are not any overt call-outs in that song. My intent was not to create some gossip-fest. I wanted people to apply it to a situation where they felt betrayed in their own lives.”
