After years of bad blood, Taylor Swift and Katy Perry buried their feud, first with a literal olive branch (a gift from Perry to Swift during the latter’s reputation tour) and then with a fun, burger-meets-fries cameo in Swift’s “You Need To Calm Down” video. If you want to find the real reason behind the feud, though, look no further than the stars.
Back in 2014, Swift told Rolling Stone that her 1989 single “Bad Blood” was about a fellow pop star with whom she was “straight-up enemies” after the singer attempted to sabotage her arena tour. Fans deduced this person was Perry, who hired backup dancers who were working on Swift’s Red tour. In interviews, Perry confirmed that this song was about her.
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In a new Rolling Stone interview about her seventh album Lover, Swift revealed that she and Perry hashed out their drama privately, and both blamed their astrological signs with how they reacted to the perceived slights.
“We were talking about how we’ve had miscommunications with people in the past, not even specifically with each other. She’s like, ‘I’m a Scorpio. Scorpios just strike when they feel threatened.’ And I was like, ‘Well, I’m an archer [a Sagittarius.] We literally stand back, assess the situation, process how we feel about it, raise a bow, pull it back, and fire.’ So it’s completely different ways of processing pain, confusion, misconception,” Swift explained in Rolling Stone.
Swift’s explanation also gives some insight into her Lover track “The Archer.” The song is a self-examination (and not a particularly flattering one) with lines that include “all of my enemies started out friends.”
The other thing we can partially blame this feud on? Sexism, which Swift said fueled a lot of drama in her life.
“It’s assumed that [successful women] hate each other,” Swift told the outlet. “Even if we’re smiling and photographed together with our arms around each other, it’s assumed there’s a knife in our pocket.”
As for Perry, she credited her fans with encouraging the artists to make up. On The Ellen DeGeneres Show Wednesday, she said she was inspired to bridge the gap between Team Katy and Team Taylor.
"We have such big groups of people that like to follow us, and they started turning against each other a little bit, too," said Perry on the talk show. "It was really unfortunate, but we made amends, and I'm all about redemption and forgiveness and for setting an example for those younger people that it can be cool to ask for forgiveness."
Fortunately, the stars aligned and brought Swift and Perry back to one another: The scorpion and the archer, finally on common ground.