Taylor Swift, Part 2: From Mic-Grabs to Feuds to the Spotify Showdown — Week 3 Playlist, July 2023
This Episode’s Playlist
Meow meow everyone, and welcome back to the weekly playlist! Every week I recommend a different set of 7 songs, and today is the second episode of our Taylor Swift special! If you haven’t read the first one yet, my dear Macs can hop back and catch up here!
Okay, enough chit-chat, let’s keep going!
This episode’s playlist ( YouTube ):
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRRUz5Ks1DvQWzOSsiQ6_4cHk5g4yVqef
This episode’s playlist ( Spotify ):
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0vYaNkTPMNq66Y3qeyQIbf?si=ad519d640d964187
Read and listen on the website ( for non-premium users, pick any song freely with nicer formatting ):
https://mydondon.net/entertainment020/
After ” Fearless “
The moment ” Fearless ” dropped, it shot straight to the top of the charts of its day, and it earned Taylor countless awards along the way. This album marked the starting point of the peak of her life, but it was also the starting point of the famous ” mic-grab incident. ” Just as MTV was about to hand Taylor the award for Best Female Video, Kanye West ( an American rapper ) suddenly snatched the microphone and declared, ” This award should have gone to Beyoncé ( an American singer ), because Beyoncé has always made the best music videos. ” Of course, this left the entire audience mortified — including Beyoncé herself.
Naturally, such an outrageous incident drew a ton of media attention and was turned into memes by netizens at the time. This single event made Taylor realize that she had gone from a singer with a lovely voice to a ” genuine mainstream celebrity ” — every move you make, intentional or not, gets placed under the spotlight and scrutinized. In 2010 she won the Grammy for Album of the Year as well as Best Country Album and more, and she was only 20 years old that year. The Grammys are arguably the highest honor in the music world, like the Oscars of music, so this was a real stamp of approval both for her and from the outside world. Sadly, though — perhaps because it was her first time on the stage of her dreams — her performance was a little shaky, which was kind of a shame.
Taylor’s Third Album ” Speak Now “
While working on her third album, she also co-wrote plenty of songs with various artists, took part in film and TV productions, and even completed her acting debut in Valentine’s Day — though people were pretty split on those movies. In August 2010 she released ” Speak Now, ” her third self-recorded album. My favorite song on it is ” Mean. ” You can read this song as pushing back against the people bullying Taylor online, or as one person trying to stand up against the injustices in society. For me, this song always restores my health bar, especially since whenever an article trends online, there are always going to be people who oppose you — and sometimes it really does get to you.
In moments like that I pull this song back up, listen to its catchy melody, and sing along: ” Someday I’ll be living in a big old city. And all you’re ever gonna be is mean. Someday I’ll be big enough so you can’t hit me. And all you’re ever gonna be is mean. ” Every time I finish this song, it feels like a close friend is standing right beside me, fighting alongside me.
On top of that, the album’s lead single ” Mine ” also stormed the charts within hours of its release. After listening to so many of her songs, you gradually realize why Taylor has been crowned a poet: many of her songs tell stories rather than repeating a single refrain. The latter may be easy to hum along to, but the former always leaves everyone wanting to relive it again and again. This song, too, is about looking back on the past, and the memories are always sweet. If an ordinary person writes a love poem to their partner, then Taylor writes a song for every beautiful memory. ” Do you remember, we were sittin’ there by the water? You put your arm around me for the first time. You made a rebel of a careless man’s careful daughter. You are the best thing that’s ever been mine. “
It’s just like that day when I secretly tucked a card into the corner of a gift. Every word written on that blank sheet was just like this song — it brought back all the wonderful things we’d been through, and let us wish, together, for a future where we still had each other.
A Second Shot on Stage & Dear John
At the 2012 Grammys she won again and earned another chance to take the stage. This time she flipped the impression the audience had formed two years earlier, and proved the abilities she possessed as a musician. Just like with her previous record, she launched the ” Speak Now Tour, ” and this time the total gross reached 123 million USD — double that of ” Fearless. ” In its 2012 list of ” The 50 Greatest Albums Made by Women of All Time, ” Rolling Stone ranked ” Speak Now ” at No. 45, writing, ” Her songs might get played on country radio, but she’s one of the few genuine rock stars we’ve got these days, with an impeccable ear that makes her songs land with a bang. ” No matter how you look at it, she just kept getting better.
Finally, I think there’s one more song on this album that deserves a mention: ” Dear John. ” Unlike the sweet love songs before it, this one is a breakup song, and most fans guess it was written for Taylor’s ex-boyfriend ” John Mayer. ” Taylor once revealed that she was dumped in one short phone call. But what gets me is that this song really lets everyone relate to it too — even if it weren’t pointed at any specific person, the whole thing sounds like a heartbroken girl recounting her own foolish past. ” Dear John, I see it all now that you’re gone. Don’t you think I was too young to be messed with? The girl in the dress cried the whole way home. I should’ve known. “
A little note here: some people might feel this song is actually meant to roast John, but I think calling it a roast goes a bit too far — to me it’s simply commemorating the past.
Even though she went through plenty of on-and-off relationships with various guys, her music career was still pretty smooth sailing. But nobody back then could have guessed that, like other celebrities, more and more drama would gradually pile up once she got famous. For the Taylor of 2012, the drama was only just beginning.
The Katy Incident
In October 2012, Taylor released her fourth album ” Red, ” and as usual she put on a tour for it. But this tour came with a pretty major drama: Taylor and Katy Perry fell out over dancers. Katy Perry was one of Taylor’s close gal pals — the two were similar in age and musical style, and perhaps because their interests aligned, they started getting closer around 2009. It began with Taylor following Katy and frequently praising the things Katy posted. Katy was, of course, thrilled about it, and they started interacting both online and offline — replying to each other’s posts, showing up in front of the cameras in matching outfits, and even inviting each other to write songs around themes they both loved.
However, their friendship started to shift in subtle ways because of two events. The first was that, in 2012, Katy got together with the very John mentioned earlier. For Taylor, who had been dumped, this naturally didn’t sit well. Just imagine your best friend getting together with a man you once loved deeply — anyone would feel a little annoyed, right!? People speculate this was one of the fuses that led to everything that followed.
The second thing happened on the ” Red Tour. ” Midway through the tour, three of her dancers suddenly bolted to Katy’s concert. You have to understand that suddenly losing three dancers mid-tour is an extremely serious matter, and it could have forced later shows to be canceled. On this, Katy merely stated that the dancers’ contracts had expired and that they chose to jump ship on their own. One of the dancers even said, ” I chose to join Katy’s show because Katy and I have a better relationship — I was part of the tour for Katy’s last album, and we’re like family. Plus, touring with Taylor I didn’t really get to dance much, so it was kind of boring. “
Setting aside whether they were poached or jumped ship on their own — what kind of excuse is that even! And bailing midway through a tour because you’re bored is an incredibly inconsiderate move; they could have just left after the tour wrapped! All in all, this move forced Taylor to recruit new dancers in the middle of the tour. Even though the shows did get pulled off in the end without disaster, this whole thing completely shattered Taylor and Katy’s friendship, and the two started sniping at each other online.
She even said in an interview that she was no longer sure whether she and Katy were friends at all: this woman ( Katy ) crossed the line, I consider us enemies now, she tried to sabotage the entire tour and poach some of my people out from under me. Taylor also began, intentionally or not, to subtly jab at this incident in her later lyrics. For instance, her 2014 album had a song called ” Bad Blood, ” which includes a line like ” you cut me deep, and now we’ve all got bad blood, ” among other lines that led everyone to associate it — whether deliberately or not — with Katy. Even the big villain in the song’s music video was made up to look a lot like Katy. After that, the two would occasionally exchange fire online and maintained this awkward relationship, and time slowly passed by. By 2016, when Katy was asked by the media whether she might ever collaborate with Taylor again in the future, Katy said that if the other party apologized, then anything was possible.
But Taylor never did apologize, and several more years went by. Katy’s attitude toward Taylor gradually softened over time, and in 2018 she decided to take the first step and apologize to Taylor, writing her an apology letter — but it was still in vain, and afterward the two remained in a cold war with little overlap. A year later, when Taylor — then on tour — walked into her dressing room, she saw an olive-branch wreath and a letter that Katy had sent. The letter read, ” Old friend, I’ve been thinking about the past misunderstandings and the bond between us. I’m truly sorry. I hope we can go back to how things were and keep being good friends. ” Perhaps because time really had washed away the anger of that period and softened her, the moment Taylor saw it she immediately filmed a video and posted it to social media, writing ” thank you Katy. ” And it was in that moment that they finally returned to the close friendship they’d once had.
Taylor’s Fourth Album ” Red “
That’s just one of the incidents everyone was bickering about back then, with a lot of details left out — so if any of you curious Macs want to know more, feel free to go search it up! And of course, plenty of other controversies followed afterward. But let’s rewind the clock back to October 2012, the year Taylor released ” Red, ” widely recognized as the turning point in her style. If you’ve heard this album, you can clearly pick up that shift in style. ” Red ” was like her formally announcing to everyone that the Queen of Country had stepped down, and that from now on she would be synonymous with pop.
Take one of my favorite songs on it, ” 22. ” It opens with that familiar guitar, but by the chorus it switches to electric guitar and drums as the backbone of the music, blending two different elements without making either feel out of place. That’s why it’s become the song I recommend every time to friends who are listening to Taylor for the first time. ” It seems like one of those nights, We ditch the whole scene, And end up dreaming instead of sleeping. ” Some nights, only when you look back do you realize just how wild you were at the time — and it was that courage that let us, tonight, touch each other’s shoulders and drift off into a deep sleep.
The reason for such a big shift was mainly the arrival of a new producer, and her way of making songs went from doing it solo to collaborating with lots of teams — turns out it actually doesn’t sound bad! Next up I want to introduce ” We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together, ” which is also a breakup song. I still remember as a kid I loved blasting this song in the car and singing it at the friend next to me. Back then we only sang it because we thought it was catchy. It wasn’t until my English got a little better that I realized singing this song at your friends is super jinxy, haha.
” I remember when we broke up the first time. Saying \”This is it, I’ve had enough.\” ‘Cause like we hadn’t seen each other in a month. ” Looks like this time the one in the song who doesn’t want to leave is the guy :>
Okay, the sixth song is another one I really love, but this time I simply love the lyrics. I think she writes lyrics with real literary taste — if you dig deep into every deliberate turn of phrase, you’ll find each word exists for some meaning. Some people have even argued endlessly over the translation of this song. ” can’t remember what song it was playing when we walked in the night we snuck into a yacht club party, pretending to be a duchess and a prince, and i said oh my, what a marvelous tune. it was the best night “
The Spotify Incident
After all that, our pop queen kept her creative energy undiminished even amid the Katy incident, and she and her producer made ” 1989 ” together. There’s a special episode worth telling about this album too. When it was released in November 2014, listeners couldn’t actually hear these songs on Spotify, mainly because Taylor didn’t want her songs available to the public for free in exchange for just watching ads. So listeners on Spotify could only see the playlist, and ironically, when they clicked play, it would even play a message: ” We are working on this, and sincerely hope the other side will have a change of heart. “
However, a week later the issue still hadn’t been resolved — instead, the other songs got pulled. A week later, Taylor decided to delete all of her songs from Spotify, on the grounds that she believed art should have a basic value. Honestly, Taylor wasn’t even the first to choose to pull songs off Spotify — famous artists like Thom Yorke and Coldplay had pulled some or all of their songs off Spotify before.
Most creators pulled their songs because the royalties Spotify pays per song are too low. The information in the brackets below comes from a content farm and may not be accurate [ According to the info I found in my searches, around 2015 each play on Spotify earned an average of 0.006 ~ 0.0084 ( currency not specified ) — and that’s only when the user is a paying subscriber ]. If you’re a free user, then what I’d earn is even less. If I were a creator, I would definitely choose to opt out too, because earning that kind of money is just too pitiful.
Taylor’s exit had a relatively huge impact on Spotify, because [ at the time, a non-negligible portion of Spotify’s users had listened to one of Taylor’s songs within a single month ], so her leaving was bound to affect the company’s future. Of course, Spotify surely tried to persuade Taylor to put her songs back on their platform, but her songs still vanished from it for quite a while. And although Taylor ultimately compromised in the end, she did change the broader landscape to some degree. On modern Spotify, I believe the rates have surely improved somewhat — and times have changed too. Nowadays most listeners use streaming media to listen to music and watch videos, so anyone who doesn’t move with the times is bound to be forced into oblivion by the tide of history.
In the years that followed, Taylor kept using her influence to give a great deal back to the music world, and she also got blasted by everyone over a certain matter for 4 years, until that whole thing finally came to a close only recently — but that’s a story for another time…
Thanks everyone for reading! This Taylor Swift feature took me a solid 12 hours or so to finish ( I’m getting more and more into torturing myself ). If you enjoyed this piece, please hit follow to make me a little happier. If this article gets more than 200 hearts, I’ll speed up the next post on my personal website — you can head over to it via the link below!
A Song Recommended by a Reader!
But I definitely haven’t forgotten that we still have one last recommended song! It comes from an anonymous Mac at ” National Taiwan Normal University ” — thanks for her support and recommendation! If you’d also like to see your song featured in this kind of article and share it with the whole world, feel free to leave a comment below. In the next post I’ll probably share the two albums ” 1989 ” and ” Reputation, ” but you can also share songs by other artists — they might just show up in a future playlist!
Alright, our seventh song is ” Back to December ” from ” Red. ” This song leads us back to a lost love, brimming with nostalgia and regret. It expresses one person’s reflection on a past relationship and a willingness to go back to that time to fix their mistakes. The song also stirs our thoughts about missed opportunities and our understanding of regret. ” These days I haven’t been sleeping. Staying up playing back myself leaving, When your birthday passed and I didn’t call. “
I hope this song can awaken memories and reflections about past love in your heart. Let’s enjoy this emotional, heartfelt song together, and use music to face our own past. Sometimes we need to confront our past mistakes and learn to forgive ourselves — only then can we move forward and chase a better future!
Thanks everyone for reading! Below you’ll find articles on other bands as well as my ramen food-diary series — if you’re interested, feel free to click through and take a look! See you in the next episode.
Marshmallow:
https://mydondon.net/entertainment015/
Reference material for this article: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YP600aVsypeMHUhsqECJVt-UURGQz6_QeO-fhPuLHyA/edit?usp=sharing
Mydondon’s new recommended-playlist family bucket ( all-drumsticks meal ) on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4Uet444O5wiNEoCRPYqhDc?si=167e8401427d4111
Mydondon’s new recommended-playlist family bucket ( all-drumsticks meal ) on YouTube:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRRUz5Ks1DvR93efV9ViecRSPsS5GNUQj