FEUD FOR THOUGHT
Distance from the rich and famous grants us the ability to praise or dis with little consequence, writes Sonia Rao. We rally behind whomever appeals to our sensibilities, and experts who study this behaviour say it’s because we use pop culture as a way to
Tabloids would have you believe that every celebrity feud is as bitter as that between the Capulets and Montagues. Most aren’t. But one that sometimes appeared to be, between Katy Perry and Taylor Swift, has finally ended.
The tiring spat over backup dancers, which famously fuelled Swift’s Bad Blood in 2014, made headlines once again in early May, after Perry mailed Swift a literal olive branch ahead of her new tour. Why do we care? Maybe you don’t — in which case, please enjoy the extra years on your life. But to those who find themselves drawn to these celebrity fights, you’re not alone.
Distance from the rich and famous grants us the ability to praise or dis with little consequence. We rally behind whomever appeals to our sensibilities, and experts who study this behaviour say it’s because we use pop culture as a way to argue about societal issues. In a way, celebrity feuds are proxy wars.
“Arguing directly about religion or gender or race can be really difficult to do, and people shut down a lot of times if you try to have those conversations,” said Steven Hyden, author of Your Favorite Band is Killing Me: What Pop Music Rivalries Reveal About the Meaning of Life. “If you can have those conversations in the guise of talking about music, it somehow makes it easier for people to do it.”
Take the saga of Swift and Kanye West, who infamously interrupted her acceptance speech at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards to declare that Beyoncé had been robbed of the best female music video award. He later apologized, Swift accepted and the two seemed friendly by 2015.
Those campaign dreams were dashed the following February when West released his track Famous, in which he raps that the pair “might still have sex,” takes credit for her fame and calls her a not-so-polite word. West insisted he had got Swift’s permission to use the lyrics, a claim she denied, so Kim Kardashian West shared part of a phone call between the artists to back her husband up. Swift had, indeed, approved the part about sex, but it’s unclear whether she knew about the reference to her fame or the profanity.
Feuds aren’t always bad for business: Swift co-opted the conflicts and created a more aggressive persona for the Reputation album and tour. But Hyden says the actual events can be looked at through a broader lens. The VMAs incident can be viewed as sexism, he said, as “an instance of a man taking something from a woman and putting her down in a public forum,” as can taking credit for her fame. The fact that he recently blamed the incident for decreasing his radio play doesn’t help.
But there’s also a race element; Hyden noted that West could have been seen as “a black man who is supposedly threatening a white woman.” The U.S. has a long, problematic history of “protecting ” white women from men of colour, rooted in a white patriarchal system of power, he said.
These disputes are especially common when the artists are in the same genre. The Beatles were mainstream and wholesome, Hyden notes, while The Rolling Stones were a dangerous and more explicit alternative. The socalled rivalry captured a moral conflict among listeners. Similarly, the feud between Toby Keith and the Dixie Chicks in the early 2000s was “explicitly political.” Either you stood with Keith in favour of then-U. S. President George W. Bush and the war, or against them.
The case of Nicki Minaj and Cardi B highlights a negative effect of fuelling feuds between artists working in the same space. As Cardi rose in popularity, some Minaj fans claimed the newcomer could never dethrone the reigning queen of rap. Others felt differently.
The rappers each have a verse on Migos’s MotorSport, released last October, which heightened comparisons.
There is plenty of room for more than one woman in hip hop. But, according to Tracyann Williams, a New School professor who teaches courses on race, gender and pop culture, comparisons persist due to racism, sexism and “the convergence of the two.”
“It gives us something else to think about, at the expense of marginalized people ... There can only be one diva, there can only be one songstress, there can only be one rap artist,” Williams said. “There can’t just be two talented women going forward and promoting their art, their work. We buy into it. It’s what sells magazines, it sells records, it sells downloads. And we’re all a part of this drama, unfortunately, unless you can take a deep breath and stop and think about what’s actually transpiring.”
Williams also brought up Rihanna and Beyoncé, who were falsely said to be fighting years ago over Jay-Z, their mentor and then-boyfriend, respectively. Similarly, Minaj and Cardi insist there was never an actual feud, which the latter reinforced during a recent interview with Howard Stern. She and Minaj had been photographed smiling and taking selfies together two days earlier, at the Met Gala.
“I never was feuding with anybody; there was a misunderstanding,” Cardi said, according to Billboard ... I didn’t wanna ever talk about it in public because I felt like we gonna see each other again and we will talk about it, and it’s always like little issues. The thing is, it’s always little issues, but you know, fans are always gonna make it a big thing.”