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Taylor Swift speaks out on the copyright acquisition of her music by alleged ‘bully’ Scooter Braun.
Pop culture exploded yesterday after a Tumblr post by pop megastar Taylor Swift called out her former label, Big Machine Records, for selling the rights to a large portion of her discography to producer Scooter Braun. In the post Swift accuses her ex manager Scott Borchetta of transferring ownership of all six of her albums to Braun, a man she alleges ‘tried to dismantle’ her career, without informing her.
Now, brushing over the frankly shocking news that people still use Tumblr, there’s a lot to unpack here. In her post Taylor states that Braun was a central figure during some of the worst years of her life, referring particularly to the escalation of her feud with the Kardashian Wests in 2015. Attached to the Tumblr paragraph is a screenshot of an Instagram tile posted by Justin Bieber in 2015 featuring him video chatting Kanye West and Scooter Braun. The caption reads ‘Taylor swift what up.’
According to Swift, the post is from a time when ‘Scooter got his two clients [Bieber and West] together to bully me online’ about an illegally released phone call between Swift and Kanye West. Swift appears to green light Kanye’s request to call her a ‘bitch’ in an upcoming song, but she has since denied that she ever gave her permission. When West’s song ‘Famous’ featured lyrics about her and included a blow-up doll with her likeness in the music video, Swift was irate.
Wait it's legit National Snake Day?!?!?They have holidays for everybody, I mean everything these days! 🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍
— Kim Kardashian (@KimKardashian) July 17, 2016
Swift signed a contract with Big Machine Records and Scott Borchetta when she was about as green as they come in this industry – an unknown 15-year-old. Like most contracts in the music world the fine print heavily favoured the label, transferring ownership rights of her original songs to Borchetta for the foreseeable future. Taylor’s post explicates, ‘this is what happens when you sign a deal at fifteen to someone for whom the term ‘loyalty’ is clearly just a contractual concept.’
Since then Swift has left Big Machine Records, but as they retain the rights to her early material, she’s had to leave this work behind her as well. Though she explains she was sure that Scott would sell on her licensing at some point, its appearance in the hands of Scooter Braun is particularly insidious given that ‘any time Scott… had heard the words ‘Scooter Braun’ escape my lips, it was when I was either crying or trying not to.’
Swift’s posts haven’t been met with unmitigated support. Yesterday Bieber clapped back with his own Instagram post which ‘apologized’ for the ‘hurtful Instagram post’ back in 2015 before accusing Taylor of ‘defacing’ Braun and ‘crossing a line’. Demi Lovato, another of Braun’s clients, also leapt to his defence, asking Taylor to ‘please stop dragging people or bullying them’.
One thing that I think is interesting in this celebrity blow up is the similarity of the language used by famous interjectors. Taylor’s original post accuses Braun of being a ‘manipulative bully’. Bieber states that the point of her blog was likely to entice her fans to ‘go and bully scooter’, and Levato reckons that Taylor’s post itself is ‘bullying’.
There’s no easier way to take all the shades of grey out of an argument than to accuse your accuser of the exact same thing you’re being accused of. It’s the same reason ‘no u’ worked so well in primary school: it’s much harder to accuse Billy-Joe of smelling bad if he then states that it is in fact you who smells bad. You end up in a stand-off whereby either everybody is smelly, or nobody is.
Moreover, the term ‘bullying’ is one of those wokeisms, like ‘gaslighting’ or ‘mansplaining’, that was invented to describe a social problem but has become so co-opted by the original guilty parties that it’s now lost all meaning. It’s my opinion that it’s being used by people in response to Swift’s statement to attempt to shut down the conversation.
According to the OED, ‘bullying’ refers to the act of seeking to ‘harm, intimidate, or coerce’ another individual. I can absolutely see how the act of three people singling out one person on social media with the aim of humiliating them to their millions of followers could be interpreted as bullying. I cannot see how a post by an individual claiming that her music has been hijacked by a man who has caused her mental distress, accompanied by supporting evidence, could be interpreted as bullying.
I do not draw this conclusion in a vacuum. Swift’s claims against Braun are not baseless. Nicki Minaj, Miley Cyrus, Lana Del Rey, Selena Gomez, Rihanna, and Adele have unfollowed Scooter on social media in the past after having interactions with him. Celebrities that have come out in support of Swift (and there are many) are ex-clients of Braun who state explicitly that he is an ‘evil man’ who has made homophobic comments and expressed anti-Swift sentiment (looking particularly at Todrick Hall’s statement).
https://twitter.com/todrick/status/1145479493521420288?lang=en
