It feels silly to be invested in the struggle between millionaires, but this is extra delicious. She’s been blocking the licensing if her back catalogue to fuck Scooter Braun as much as possible, so it’s great to see her use her new recording of her old music like this.

Yeah, totally. I don't really look at it as a money thing. No one involved is hurting financially. But the way things were handled just makes me want to puke. That woman MADE Big Machine what it is, and the deal they tried to rope her into instead of just letting her buy her OWN WORK back (which she almost certainly has the money for) might have been legal but it was morally repugnant. And the thing is, it's not just the big names who are treated that way. We just don't hear about the small people record labels screw over.

It feels silly to be invested in the struggle between millionaires, but this is extra delicious. She’s been blocking the licensing if her back catalogue to fuck Scooter Braun as much as possible, so it’s great to see her use her new recording of her old music like this.

If you check out the area around the dumpster when 2020 and Satan are taking a selfie, you'll see a broken scooter. Nice touch. :)

It feels silly to be invested in the struggle between millionaires, but this is extra delicious. She’s been blocking the licensing if her back catalogue to fuck Scooter Braun as much as possible, so it’s great to see her use her new recording of her old music like this.

This is one fight where I have no problem rooting for the millionaire pop princess. The music industry might be even worse than Hollywood when it comes to the levels of corruption and exploitation that fuel the entire thing. Artists are used up and tossed aside like pieces of trash as a matter of course. And while actors can often find some level of solidarity together within their industry (it’s practically impossible to be an actor without meeting, collaborating, and developing relationships with other actors), musicians are kept further away from each other the more successful they become. It’s not a coincidence that so few bands make it to superstar status anymore. Bands often become something not unlike a family. Even if the internal workings of the group are full of conflict and drama, they’ll often close ranks and unify when faced with any kind of external threat (such as a manipulative manager or a label trying to push an exploitative contract). Labels would much rather put their money behind an individual who they can isolate, control, and grind into the ground while they milk them for everything they’ve got. That’s the other problem with bands. It’s far tougher to keep a whole group satisfied, so a band that’s getting pushed around is far more likely to have one or more members say “fuck this, I’m gone”, and then the label has lost their golden goose. A single pop star is far easier to prop up, even if their life is falling apart around them.

So I’m happy to cheer for Tay Tay on this one. It doesn’t matter how much money she has. If she wrote those songs, they should be hers. If she DIDN’T, well then we’re in a whole different situation [glances suspiciously towards Lady Gaga]. But I haven’t heard any credible claims of that kind regarding Taylor, so for the time being I’m rooting for her to stay in control and keep fighting. I only hope she manages to keep it together where so many musicians and pop stars before her have cracked or broken.

The movie she did with Bradley Cooper made me like Lady Gaga. Still not a huge fan of most of her music, but I like that soundtrack, and there’s no denying she’s got talent and a great voice.

I like Katy Perry, too, but she needs to quit trying to be a pop princess and expand a little. She’s got the voice for it.

Taylor Swift was smart enough to reinvent herself, multiple times now. She did the pop thing with 1989, then the bad girl pop thing with Reputation (which is a decent album, but that mood was a miss in my opinion). And now with Folklore she’s leaning into the sort of indie singer-songwriter thing, which I absolutely love.

This is gonna sound more critical than I mean it at first, but please bare with me.

I feel like I just watched a Barbara Streisand impersonator. Now, I say that believing that it takes an incredibly talented individual to do a half-decent impersonator of Streisand, so this isn’t a knock against Lady Gaga’s ability in any way. I just wish I could point to something she’s done and say “only she sounds like that”. Because I think she’s talented as heck. Like, I think she can sing circles around Madonna, yet most of her career seems to have been spent trying to look and sound like her.