Why so mean taylor swift

Swift worked in a confessional mode, and part of her widespread appeal was how flung-open her emotions appeared; if you hurt her, she wrote about the ways you hurt her, and then sprinkled her liner notes with hints as if to whisper: Yes, I was referring to you.

This intimate approach built a legion of devoted, empathetic fans, but also shoehorned Swift into the limiting role of the easily bruised naif. And despite her excellent reception, she often grabbed headlines for being a whiz kid; her breezy, deft confessional narratives were sometimes categorized as teenybopper alchemy, which was something Swift pushed back on from the beginning.

And then it happened. As Swift spoke, a Hennessy-soaked Kanye West catapulted himself to the stage and grabbed the microphone from her hand. Swift was despondent. The incident initially provided Swift with a major swell of positive PR. Even more important than goodwill, the moment moved records, something her camp openly admitted.

The intertwined artists had each found a way to turn the incident into music. Swift had officially been introduced to most of America. Her next move was domination. Swift got a true fairy-tale awards show moment the next year, in , when she became the first solo female country act to win the Grammy for Album of the Year for Fearless. She kept a regimented schedule, releasing an album every two years— Speak Now in , and her fourth album, Red , in Both debuted at no.

Since her Joe Jonas days, Swift had gravitated toward famous romantic partners, a habit she kept as the years went on, her increasing fame—and the increasing fame of her boyfriends—making her a constant presence in tabloids. The Easter eggs she left in her liner notes, like capitalized letters spelling out words or acronyms hinting at who each song was about, played into the curiosity around her delectably passive-aggressive lyricism. And though present in the tabloids for her romantic life, Swift managed to keep her image squeaky clean; while slightly older peers like Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears were publicly struggling through substance use issues and photographed in embarrassing and dangerous situations, the closest Swift got to a scandal was dating an year-old Kennedy scion and making her neighbors angry for … digging up rocks.

Her awards-show face became a meme. Or, almost nobody. And in , Salon , in perhaps its most Salon moment to date, argued that Swift was overrated because people had lowered their expectations for life after the recession. But these were contrarian provocations, and in general, Swift had reached an ascendant point in her career and public image. By , Swift was the most popular country-music act in the world, but not yet the most popular music act in the world. It was a pop blockbuster, with songs so polished and precision-engineered for Top 40 it seemed like Swift had consulted some demonic algorithm developed to lodge a song in the brain forever, to get it played at football games, bat mitzvahs, and weddings as well as rodeos.

While the country music market still had a robust album-buying culture and had its own touring circuits and Nashville darlings, working within a genre pigeonholed Swift, even if she was clearly producing music that felt as much pop as country on Red. Despite a sharp industrywide decrease in record sales, was a massive success, exceeding commercial expectations by hitting 5 million U. She began gathering famous female pals with gusto, embarking on high-profile friendships with Lena Dunham, Lorde, and a wide range of narrow models, most notably Karlie Kloss.

Paine did not respond to a request for comment for this story. Instead, as her star power continued to grow, Swift occasionally used both the media and social media to advocate for the payment of artists.

In , she explained her decision to pull her music from Spotify in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, saying she did not believe the platform fairly compensated artists. In the summer of , she used Tumblr to lambast Apple for not paying artists for the streams of their work that customers played during their free trials, which then caused Apple to nearly immediately capitulate. So immediately, in fact, that it stirred up theories of a secret arrangement between Swift and Apple. During the same album cycle, Swift pointedly highlighted herself as someone who had been on the receiving end of gendered criticism.

Invoking feminism was, like most Swift moves, a prudent shield. She was between albums, yet her purposefully high-profile life kept her in the public eye. Perhaps she could sense what was coming. The two stars quickly made up.

That was all a prelude to the real backlash, which began when Kanye West reentered the picture. The two had publicly made nice the previous year at the Grammys as well as the VMAs, when Swift presented West an award, and West told Ryan Seacrest that they had even considered collaboration. West also sent Swift a square made of flowers , which she Instagrammed. I made that bitch famous. And when Swift won Album of the Year in later that month, she appeared to upbraid West during her speech.

Kanye insisted that she had approved the lyrics. That June, Kim Kardashian West insisted to GQ that Kanye had received permission—and subsequently released on Snapchat a recording of Swift verbally approving the song and thanking West for calling her.

Victimhood at the hands of West was a narrative Swift had often stoked and benefited from. Now, though, she was in too deep—her alleged machinations had been exposed. Swift, however, did not. But in an election as contentious as , silence was its own statement, an announcement of privilege too loud to ignore. And although Swift would eventually come out in support of Democrats, her often-noted silence during the presidential campaign made her into an unwilling symbol of complacency and right-wing sympathy.

In the fall of , Swift teased the release of Reputation with images of snakes, signaling that she intended to address the Kimye debacle and her tarnished image. Swift had mined hits from her intrapersonal conflicts in the past, so continuing the tradition made sense. It is actually the longest-charting song Swift has ever had, courtesy of the adult contemporary chart. Instead, Swift doubled down on maximum commercialization; she partnered with ESPN to preview a single during a college football game, and partnered with UPS to plaster promotional posters on its brown trucks.

If she was going to be a snake, she was going to be an ultracapitalist snake. A montage of Swift plucking away at her banjo is shown alternately throughout the video with scenes of a boy being bullied while reading a fashion magazine in a locker room by the football team, and a girl, wearing a fast-food uniform, who is being made fun of by her peers with her job promotion.

Another cut-scene shows a girl who was not welcomed by the girls to sit with the popular clique at lunch, and had to eat lonely in the girls' washroom. The next scene shows that the stage is transformed into a bright and ritzy stage, with the singer all dazzled up in a sparkly flapper gown performing in the big leagues.

After the bridge of the song, it is revealed that the boy reading the fashion magazine is now a famous fashion designer; the fast food girl saves up for college and is a big-time executive. The final scene shows the other girl sitting as an audience watching and applauding as Swift finishes performing.

I get it that not everyone is going to like everything that you do, and I get that no matter what, you're going to be criticized for something. But I also get that there are different kinds of ways to criticize someone. There is constructive criticism.

There's professional criticism. And then, there's just being mean. There's a line that you cross when you just start to attack everything about a person, and there's one guy who just crossed the line over and over again.

Just being mean, and saying things that would ruin my day. This happens There's always going to be someone who's just mean to you. Dealing with that is all you can control about that situation, how you handle it. Taylor Swift Wiki Explore. Speak Now World Tour: Live. Roles Valentine's Day film. The Lorax film. Coolest musical instrument ever Fan survey Waving cats.