Taylor Swift is one of the biggest celebrities and pop stars in the whole wide world. Her influence across the world is considered so consequential that some even reckon she can change the face of American politics (quite literally!). While that may or not be true, what is true is that a person as powerful as her has had her fair share of enemies.
From her ex-boyfriend Calvin Harris to Kanye West, there have been numerous A-listers on the I Knew You Were Trouble hitmakers’ hate list. But the one celebrity, Swift straight-up called her ‘enemy’ is the 13 times Grammy nominated music icon, Katy Perry.
When Taylor Swift Called Katy Perry Her Enemy
Be it the normal world or the glorious world of celebrities, enemies exist in every corner, nook, or cranny. And when it comes to Taylor Swift, the pop artist has collected a significant number of A-list enemies like one would collect Pokémon. One of her most famous feuds was with artist Katy Perry.
The 13-time Grammy-nominated artist, who hasn’t won a single Grammy while Swift has 14 of those, first started as friends in 2009. They even publicly exchanged numerous niceties but it was in 2014 that things went down. In 2014, Swift gave an interview with Rolling Stone, and revealed that her angriest song in 1989 album was about another female artist,
“For years, I was never sure if we were friends or not. She would come up to me at awards shows and say something and walk away, and I would think, ‘Are we friends, or did she just give me the harshest insult of my life?’… I was like, ‘Oh, we’re just straight-up enemies.'”
As Swift herself revealed the issue was because of some backup dancers. Things went on the same for some years, with Swift even once stating that she will never talk about her again and that she has enemies as would anyone else in their life (via The Telegraph). Things went on and on, with even her ex-boyfriend Calvin Harris chiming in one time (see Entertainment Weekly), until in 2017 Katy Perry herself revealed the real reason for their feud.
Katy Perry Revealed The Reason For Her Feud With Taylor Swift
After going back and forth for quite some years and the two allegedly writing songs about each other or their ‘relationship’, Katy Perry herself cleared the air as to why she and Swift were not friends anymore. While on James Cordon’s Carpool Karaoke (via Entertainment Weekly and Entertainment Tonight), Perry revealed the real issue,
“Okay, so there was like three backing dancers that went on tour with her tour, right? And they asked me before they went on tour if they could go, and I was like, ‘Yeah, of course. I’m not on a record cycle and get the work, and she’s great and all that. But I will be on a record cycle probably in about a year. So, be sure to put a 30-day contingency in your contract, so you can get out if you want to join me when I say I’m going back on. So that year came up, right? And I texted all of them because I’m very close with them and I said, ‘Look, just FYI, I’m about to start. I want to put the word out there.’ They said, ‘Okay, well we’re gonna go and talk to management about it.’ And they did, and they got fired.”
While the apparent feud between them went on for another year or so, things eventually started improving in 2017 when Perry apologized to Swift (see GMA). By 2018 and 2019, things had improved a lot, since Perry went on to star in Swift’s You Need to Calm Down video and Perry cleared it all as just a misunderstanding in an interview with Ellen DeGeneres.
