With all due respect to Nicki Minaj and Mariah Carey, the biggest ongoing beef in the pop world belongs to Taylor Swift and Katy Perry.
As the story goes, Swift accused Perry to Rolling Stone of stealing her backup dancers, telling the magazine that she “basically tried to sabotage an entire arena tour.” The jab prompted Perry to subtweet the country-pop star with an ace Mean Girls reference:
Swift, as is her wont, fired back with “Bad Blood”—a self-described “diss track” dedicated to her feud with Perry for which the Pennsylvanian recruited a dozen A-list women and pitted them against her rival in the accompanying music video.
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But we have yet to hear Perry’s side of the story. Until now.
On the heels of her rumored Swift diss track “Swish Swish,” Perry opened up to host James Corden about the Swift imbroglio during a Late Late Show Carpool Karaoke segment Monday night.
“Now, I want to talk to you about some famous beef. Because there’s Taylor beef. There’s no denying it: There’s Taylor beef. And when are we going to clear that beef up?” Corden asked Perry.
“Well, there is. No, for sure—and that’s true. There’s a situation. Honestly, it’s like, she started it and it’s time for her to finish it,” replied Perry.
Then, Perry attempted to explain the origin story.
“It’s about backing dancers. It’s so crazy!” said Perry. “OK, so there are three backing dancers that went on tour with her tour, right? And they asked me before they went on tour if they could go, and I was like, ‘Yeah, of course. I’m not on a record cycle, and get the work, and she’s great and all that. But I will be on a record cycle in about a year, so be sure to put a 30-day contingency in your contract so you can get out if you want to join me when I say I’m going back on.’”
“So that year came up, right?” she continued. “And I texted all of them—because I’m very close with them—and I said, ‘Look, just FYI: I’m about to start, I want to put the word out there.’ And they said, ‘All right, we’re going to talk to management about it.’ And they did. And they got fired. And I tried to talk to [Swift] about it, and she wouldn’t speak to me.”
Perry added: “It was a full shutdown and then she writes a song about me. And I’m like, ‘Oh, cool, cool, cool… that’s how you wanna deal with it? Karma.’ But what I wanna say is that, like, I’m ready for that BS to be done. Now, there is the law of cause and effect. You do something and there’s gonna be a reaction. And trust me, daddy, there’s gonna be a reaction.”
For her part, Perry said she wished to end the beef with Swift, offering, “I think, personally, that women together—not divided and, like, none of this petty shit—women together will heal the world.”
“So would it be enough to just receive a text from Taylor Swift that just said ‘the beef is off the grill?’” asked Corden.
“One hundred percent,” said Perry.
