The Nicki Minaj debate is bigger than Taylor Swift's ego

“If I was a different ‘kind’ of artist, Anaconda would be nominated for best choreo and vid of the year”. And there, in a single tweet on Tuesday, rapper Nicki Minaj kicked off a conversation about race, feminism, and the music industry that might have been ignored had it not been derailed by the planet’s biggest pop star, Taylor Swift.

“When the ‘other’ girls drop a video that breaks records and impacts culture they get that nomination,” wrote Minaj. Her point is one about the unspoken bias and sometimes out-and-out racism of an industry that has profited from the talent of black artists without giving them their dues. Or, at the very least, a trophy of an astronaut from MTV.

Swift, possibly unable to imagine a debate bigger than her or her ego, took instant personal offence and tweeted, in po-faced hurt: “@NICKIMINAJ I’ve done nothing but love & support you. It’s unlike you to pit women against each other. Maybe one of the men took your slot.”

Minaj responded: “‘Huh? U must not be reading my tweets. Didn’t say a word about u. I love u just as much. But u should speak on this @taylorswift13.” And she should. Minaj invited Swift to wield her mighty power to call out the music industry – or even just MTV – for its racial bias, unconscious or otherwise. Because, of course, Swift is the one-woman saviour of pop. Last month, she wrote an open letter complaining about Apple’s new music streaming service refusing to pay artists for the first three months. The world’s biggest tech brand buckled in 24 hours.

Yet, instead of listening to Minaj, her supposed friend and collaborator, Swift responded: “@NICKIMINAJ If I win, please come up with me!! You’re invited to any stage I’m ever on.” A tweet that, at best, could be read as patronising and ignorant; at worst, vacuous and self-absorbed.

The broader point Minaj is making is clear: throughout music history, black women aren’t recognised in the popular music canon in the same way their white counterparts are. As Minaj tweeted: “If your video celebrates women with very slim bodies, you will be nominated for vid of the year … I’m not always confident. Just tired. Black women influence pop culture so much but are rarely rewarded for it.”

Yet without Swift making the story about her, Minaj’s tweets would likely have been talked about by sections of Twitter, music journalists and fans, before everyone shrugged and moved on. The wider reporting of the story has since twisted what is a valid conversation – about what makes a white artist outstanding, and why a black artist isn’t allowed to compete on the same terms. The coverage has reduced the debate to a catfight between two massive female stars, where Swift is the winner, taking down another woman who needs to know her place. It is insidious and crass.

In this retelling, Minaj is archetyped as the angry black woman, while Swift is bizarrely cast as the feminist hero. Pictures – deliberately selected, remember – to illustrate the story online by Glamour magazine, the Daily Mail, and Entertainment Weekly (some of them since deleted) show Minaj pulling faces or looking daft, or simply focus on her bum. The underlying message is that she’s wacky, unhinged and clearly the hyper-sensitive loser here. Ones of Swift, by comparison, show her looking soft, delicate and “unthreatening” – the victim under attack.

It didn’t stop at picture editing. Consider the bias on show when Glamour tweeted its take: “@taylorswift13 shut down @NICKIMINAJ on Twitter and it was WONDERFUL.” A sentence that embodies everything wrong with white feminism’s refusal to acknowledge, let alone understand, that unless “the struggle” in 2015 is intersectional (you know, taking in priorities that aren’t just about white women in the west serving white women in the west), it is irrelevant. To no credit, Glamour later retweeted the story as: “@taylorswift13 and @NICKIMINAJ embroiled in Twitter row.”

Anaconda was a video brilliantly calculated to be parodied and memed, blogged and talked about endlessly on its release last year. The fact that it was watched 19.6m times in 24 hours and smashed records to become the most watched video ever on Vevo was a bonus. As Minaj pointed out: ‘U couldn’t go on social media w/o seeing ppl doing the cover art, choreo, outfits for Halloween ... and impact like that and no [Video of the Year] nomination?”

Swift’s video for Bad Blood was pitched to have the same effect: in it, she gathers a clique of her bezzies, including Lena Dunham, Cara Delevingne and Ellie Goulding, and stomps about in PVC, sexily pouting and kickboxing the girl (widely assumed to represent Katy Perry) who wronged her. On its debut in May, the video broke Minaj’s record and picked up more than 20m views in 24 hours; MTV has shortlisted it seven times in the VMAs, including for best video, art direction and director of the year. Anaconda is up for best hip-hop and best female video.

As blogger oneofthosefaces put it: “Miley spent the whole of 2013 building an adult career on the back of strapping on a fake booty and twerking her way to stratospheric success. If you rundown Nicki’s tweets and retweets, she was drawing parallels, not suggesting any of this year’s nominees had taken her spot. Her argument was specifically about the difference in the way white bodies and black bodies are portrayed. It’s an argument she’s made before, when she compared ‘acceptable’ white girls in bikinis to her ‘unacceptable’ Anaconda cover art.”

To put it another way: Minaj’s arse is considered too sexual, too crude, too shockingly unpalatable when she deliberately and provocatively, puts it on show, whereas the same pose struck by white models is taken as sexy, friendly and OK.

At the time of writing, “Nicky Minaj + Taylor Swift + VMA” turns up 2.8m results on Google News. Minaj, apparently unfazed by the column inches mounting, later contradicted headlines stating that she had taken “a jab” at Swift: “Nothing I said had to do with Taylor. So what jabs? White media and their tactics. So sad. That’s what they want.”

For its part, the response from “white media” has been inevitably prickly and sensitive about being called out by Minaj; as if being challenged on racial bias is worse than that bias existing in the first place. It’s a bizarre state of affairs, perfectly summed up by Taylor Swift’s final response to the matter: closing the conversation down by unfollowing Nicky Minaj on Twitter.