The Kardashian-Swift Feud is My Favorite TV Show

By Zack Boehm on July 18, 2016

Take it in.

Bask in the warm, resplendent glow of celebrity scuttlebutt. Breathe in the intoxicating vapors of the Snapchat salvo. Imbibe the sweet, fiery liquor of the hastily composed, lawyer-approved Instagram riposte. Bathe in the brilliant firework display of the fallout. In this time of tragedy, tension, and gloom, reach for this beautiful little tincture of pure voyeuristic gratification. Enjoy. We all deserve it.

Last night on Snapchat, Kim Kardashian posted the footage (which she and her husband had both cryptically alluded to in the past) of Taylor Swift personally consenting to the now infamous lyric in Kanye West’s song “Famous”. And thus the ancient promise of the social media age was dazzlingly fulfilled: low-stakes, high-drama celebrity conflict-theater played out in real time, raw and unmediated (or at least with the illusion of rawness and unmediatedness), in easily digestible seven second capsule videos. This is what we signed up for.

via nytimes.com

If you were to dismiss the Swift-Kardashian saga as the kind of vapid celebrity frivolity that late capitalist societies belch out in order to distract us from deep festering injustices, you’d probably be right. But you’d also be a huge bummer.

The internet, or at least the corners of the internet that I tend to inhabit, have been unabashedly captivated by the beef. What was perhaps more astonishing than the revelation that Swift did indeed know about the lyric was the sheer volume of giddy responses to that revelation, the earnestness with which the footage was deconstructed and parsed. The conversation between West and Swift that appears in the Snapchat videos has been transcribed and pored over. Close readings have been done. Questions about the legality of Kim Kardashian posting a private phone conversation have been explored in granular detail. The New York Times ran an article documenting the long arc of the Kanye-Kim-Taylor imbroglio. People have been really, really into the story.

And who can blame them? The players on this stage are downright Shakespearean. The maligned artist, reviled and misunderstood by the public (I understand you, Kanye!!) The wife hell-bent on protecting the honor of her besieged husband. The titanic pop star who, after making a career of coolly annihilating foes, scorned lovers, and haters (Katy ETC) through her music and media savvy, finally gets her comeuppance (in reality this will probably end up meaning very little practically for Swift, but, you know, comeuppance plays better). This story has real dramatic heft, and people have consumed it with the kind of ultra-engaged voraciousness usually reserved for popular fiction. There have been recaps and explainers, like those that are published the day after a particularly confusing episode of Game of Thrones, and Twitter has been abuzz with prattle, memes, and fan theories (what if Taylor is in on this entire thing? What if Kim doctored the footage? What if Kanye is an alien lizard sent to Earth to sabotage the 2020 election?) As a piece of cultural ephemera, the Kardashian-Swift feud feels like it has more in common with an HBO event series than with a People Magazine public interest piece.

via vogue.com

Once, in one of those rare moments where he is able to intelligibly demonstrate how acutely self-aware he really is, Kanye West explained that he considered his entire life a working piece of performance art. This is a testament to how profoundly Kanye understands the culture of celebrity, how the constructed public self of a celebrity eventually becomes indistinguishable from the private “authentic” self. He understands, especially in the all-access technological panopticon, that the artifice of a person’s celebrity will inevitably bleed into their personal identity. That they, in a sense, become their character.

Two of the only people on the planet who may understand the subtle mechanics of celebrity better than Kanye are Kim Kardashian and Taylor Swift. Kardashian and her family have blurred the lines between drama and reality so thoroughly that they no longer exist in any real way, and Swift, with her confessional, unmistakably personal music and her meticulously curated public image, has mastered the art of leveraging personal (read: romantic) histories into monumental commercial successes. These two women do not inhabit their characters, because that would suggest that they take off the costume at the end of the day. Rather, they have built their respective empires on acting out their lives as celebrities in front of a public who are all too eager watch. Few people negotiate celebrity as adroitly as these women, and that is, at least in part, what has made them so successful. They are always on.

via cosmopolitan.com

Which is why the continuingly arresting “Famous” incident makes for such fascinating dramatic spectacle. It represents a convergence of three of the most riveting characters in the great lurid television show that is Celebrity. Notice that, in her Instagram rebuttal of the footage, Taylor Swift pleaded that she would “like very much to be excluded from this narrative”. Not “unfortunate situation” or “deep misunderstanding”, but narrative. Taylor Swift has seen where this story arc is going and she’s not at all happy about it. But as far as I’m concerned, this might be the best episode of the season.

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