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Weekly updates


A Twitter altercation involving Nicki Minaj and Taylor Swift has the internet lit right now. The incident happened yesterday, after Nicki Minaj tweeted MTV–who had congratulated her on being nominated for Hip-hop Video of the Year–voicing her surprise at neither ‘Feeling Myself’ or ‘Anaconda’ being nominated for the Video of the Year award. First Nicki was jovial, joking that she might have missed the deadline, but then said, “If I was a different “kind” of artist, Anaconda would be nominated for best choreo and vid of the year as well”. She went on to highlight valid points that the song was a cultural phenomenon. It’s true, the ‘Anaconda’ video’s iconography was re-appropriated by everyone with an internet connection, and the video itself sassily satirised the way women are viewed in the music industry. It should have, at the very least, been nominated over Ed Sheeran’s derivative ballroom dance clip.

Things got a little heated from here on out after she said that when other girls drop a video that affects culture and breaks records, they get a nomination. And then insinuated that if her video celebrated “women with very slim bodies” it would have been nominated for video of the year. Taylor Swift saw this and decided that Nicki was talking about here and decided to speak up, “I’ve done nothing but love & support you. It’s unlike you to pit women against each other. Maybe one of the men took your slot..”. After which, she was slaughtered for the hubristic notion that she was being singled out. It looks ridiculous that Tay clapped back at Nicki, but it does sound like Nicki was talking about her. Swift was the only other “slim girl” whose video had “broken records” to be nominated. In fact, her video, ‘Bad Blood’, broke the record previously held by ‘Anaconda’ for video streams by 500,000. And there’s the fact that all throughout ‘Bad Blood’, slim girls are celebrated, as the video features cameos from nearly all of Swift’s famous friends who are invariably both slim and famous. The internet might have smelt blood and lunged to lynch Taylor Swift, but is it really that big of a stretch for her to think Nicki was directing the tweets at her, I mean, it’s a bit of a coincidence.

At first Nicki was (maybe faux) surprised saying, “Huh? U must not be reading my tweets. Didn’t say a word about u. I love u just as much. But u should speak on this.” Which had Swift rescinding her comments and saying that if she wins, Nicki should come on stage with her. But that only fuelled the fire. Things got nasty and Minaj showed how she really thought by retweeting and favouriting tweets from fans who rallied to her defence.

Kim K also got into the mix with an inadvertently hilarious tweet that seemed to put Taylor Swift in her place a la Kanye at the 2009 VMAs. See the whole twitter exchange in the gallery above.

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