Nicki Minaj and Taylor Swift Feud

Background

On July 21th, 2015, MTV announced the nominations for their annual Video Music Awards. The nominations for Music Video of the Year, a coveted award, were for the following five songs and videos: Beyoncé – “7/11"; Ed Sheeran – “Thinking Out Loud”; Taylor Swift ft. Kendrick Lamar – “Bad Blood”; Mark Ronson ft. Bruno Mars – “Uptown Funk”; and Kendrick Lamar – “Alright.”^[1] These nominations were notably absent of any work by artist Nicki Minaj.

Taylor Swift's video for "Bad Blood," when released, earned 20.1 million views in the first 24 hours after its release, breaking a record that was previously held by Nicki Minaj's video for "Anaconda," which earned 19.6 million in its first 24 hours.^[9] Both songs were eligible for a VMA in the same year. In addition, in the 2014-2015 span, Minaj also released the first video through artist-run the streaming service Tidal, "Feeling Myself," with co-owner Beyoncé; Swift had recently signed a public deal to allow her music to be streamed through Apple Music.

Notable Developments

Shortly after the announcement about the nominations, Nicki Minaj posted the following series of tweets:

Thinking that the "women with slim bodies" was a direct reference to her video's nomination, Taylor Swift later responded (shown below, left). Nicki Minaj responded that the tweets were not about her, but rather about a more general issue in American culture (shown below, middle). Swift later apologized for misinterpreting Minaj's intention with her tweets (shown below, right).

Other Celebrity Tweets

Kim Kardashian tweeted her husband's, Kanye West, famous line against Taylor Swift line, first used at the VMAs in 2009, but has since then deleted the tweet and later claimed it was a misunderstanding on her side.^[10]

Ed Sheeran and Bruno Mars pretended to also have a feud. Katy Perry also tweeted a cloudy reference to the feud, intimating that Swift was having an ironic reaction, since "Bad Blood" is a song about having a feud with another woman.

News Coverage

The media quickly identified the exchange as a feud, with articles in entertainment magazines like Glamour, the Daily Mail, and Entertainment Weekly (which rescinded its article after receiving criticism over the photographs it used, which portrayed Minaj as "an angry black woman" and Swift normally).^[2][3][4] Many articles claimed that Minaj was being a sore loser, and that Swift was right to defend against her attacks, instead using her Feminist beliefs to try to convince Minaj that the real target should be the male nominees.

However, other Minaj-endorsed articles in outlets like the Guardian,^[6] Marie Claire,^[7] and Time Magazines^[8] discussed the tweets in terms of their relationship to intersectionality, which is an alternate way to view discrimination, which states that social inequality is viewed as an "intersection" of several different types of discrimination.^[5] These articles claimed that there was no actual fight between Minaj and Swift, but instead, they were expressing their different views of the cultural issue of feminism.

Search Interest

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External References