Why The RIP Taylor Swift Mural In Melbourne Isn’t Funny

First up. Yes. It says Taylor Smith. Lushsux told Pedestrian.tv writing ‘Smith’ was an accident: “I think I just did the cursive too thick.” So I guess I did the cursive too thick on this article myself, and from now on I’ll be calling our dear street artist jerk. It was a slip of my spray can, soz.

Because do not extricate the fact that jerk is a dude from this whole thing. It’s not a coincidence. A young man laughing at a successful woman is about as surprising as feeling pain when someone tries to pull your tooth out. A young man laughing at a successful woman and then assuming that he’s tapped into a zeitgeist and that the world will laugh along with him is also not surprising –  by and large young men don’t seem to have a lot of difficulty being heard. And look, here’s a woman who also wishes to be heard, her interests, time, skills deemed valid, time for a collective laugh sesh. TSwift is an easy target. There’s nothing we like more than seeing someone’s fall from grace.

But why are we laughing? Why does Taylor Swift deserve our ire?

"I mean what dirt do we have on Swift really? She has break-ups and then she writes about those break-ups, like every singer-songwriter that has ever written a song in the history of the world."

A timeline:

On Monday Kim Kardashian, truth teller, posted a series of Snapchats apparently showing Kanye West on the phone to Taylor Swift, discussing explicit references to Swift in Famous. The line they discuss in video is “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex.” And you know what? It does sound like Swift is cool with it.

At no point on the video is explicit reference made to the following line: “Why? I made that bitch famous.”

Which is precisely the line Swift has qualms with in her response, which she later that day posted to Instagram:"Where is the video of Kanye telling me he was going to call me 'that bitch' in his song? It doesn't exist because it never happened. You don't get to control someone's emotional response to being called 'that bitch' in front of the entire world.”

Which actually seems like a pretty fair response – someone has recorded your private conversation without your permission (which is illegal in California: by law, all parties taking part in the call must be notified of the recording) and then put it on the internet, with the aim of, we don’t know, making her her look like a fool, or deceptive, because Swift has never acknowledged that she was privy to the lyric prior to the song’s release. It’s a lyric that calls her a bitch, and that, to paraphrase Swift at the Grammy’s, undercuts her success.

What are we really celebrating here? Someone with a fairly clean image — I mean what dirt do we have on Swift really? She has break-ups and then she writes about those break-ups, like every singer-songwriter that has ever written a song in the history of the world — might have been exposed as being aware that Kanye West intended to release a song that directly references her. If we accept that it is possible she knew about the second line — which we don’t have confirmation for — and chose to deny that, her image is now a little smudged. So what? And then? Why do we want her to fail? Really, let’s talk about this. Why? How is it in anybody’s interest for one of the best pop singer-songwriters in the world, someone who young women across the world adore and seek to become like, because she is successful and privileges her friendships with other women and she sings about her feelings, to be brought down? Like what does that actually achieve?

And maybe can we reserve our ire for something like worth raging against? Like maybe we could dismantle the structures that mean that successful men are considered worth emulating but successful women need to be brought down a peg (by a man, mind you)? Like maybe we need to just stop for one second and like think about the thing that’s making us clap our hands in glee. And whether or not painting a picture of someone on a wall to joyously celebrate their ‘death’ is very funny.

I’m not sure it is.