Let’s Talk About That Taylor Swift GQ Interview

Taylor Swift‘s GQ interview hit online today, and it’s exactly what you’d think a Taylor Swift would be. You can read the whole thing if you want, but let’s skip to the good stuff, shall we?

She hates being called “calculating” then literally explains how she’s calculating in the very next sentence:

Late in our lunch, I mention something that happened several years ago: By chance, I’d found myself having dinner with a former acquaintance of Swift’s who offhandedly described her as “calculating.” This is the only moment during our interview when Swift appears remotely flustered. She really, really hates the word calculating. She despises how it has become tethered to her iconography and believes the person I met has been the singular voice regurgitating this categorization. As she explains these things, her speech does not oscillate from the second mode. “Am I shooting from the hip?” she asks rhetorically. “Would any of this have happened if I was? In that sense, I do think about things before they happen. But here was someone taking a positive thing—the fact that I think about things and that I care about my work—and trying to make that into an insinuation about my personal life. Highly offensive. You can be accidentally successful for three or four years. Accidents happen. But careers take hard work.”

Totally. Not sure why anyone would call Taylor Swift “calculating”. Oh, I know, maybe because if this. And this. And this. Or this + this. Or this. I didn’t even have to flip the calendar back to find those.  Taylor Swift? Calculating?! Get the fuck off. You’re talking crazy talk.

On how she will never say that “Bad Blood” is about Katy Perry, but is okay if other people do that for her:

You’re in a Rolling Stone interview, and the writer says, “Who is that song about? That sounds like a really intense moment from your life.” And you sit there, and you know you’re on good terms with your ex-boyfriend, and you don’t want him—or his family—to think you’re firing shots at him. So you say, “That was about losing a friend.” And that’s basically all you say. But then people cryptically tweet about what you meant. I never said anything that would point a finger in the specific direction of one specific person, and I can sleep at night knowing that. I knew the song would be assigned to a person, and the easiest mark was someone who I didn’t want to be labeled with this song. It was not a song about heartbreak. It was about the loss of friendship. (on how nobody thinks the song is about a guy) But they would have. So I don’t necessarily care who people think it’s about. I just needed to divert them away from the easiest target. Listen to the song. It doesn’t point to any one person or any one situation. But if you’d listened to my previous four albums, you would think this was about a guy who broke my heart. And nothing could be further from the truth. It was important to show that losing friendships can be just as damaging to a person as losing a romantic relationship.

Look, we all know “Bad Blood” is about Katy Perry. Katy Perry knows “Bad Blood” is about Katy Perry. Taylor Swift knows “Bad Blood” is about Katy Perry. This is a thing we know. But I guess it must be hard to say, “yeah, Bad Blood is about that Katy Perry bitch” when you have people who hover around your orbit who actually believe you invented girls being friends. Anyway. That being said, I’d still hit it like a Doctors Without Borders hospital.