The Real Meaning Behind Bad Blood By Taylor Swift

Publish date: 2024-01-03

Although the meanings behind Taylor Swift's songs have always been a hot topic of speculation, "Bad Blood" set fans abuzz with curiosity. Speaking with Rolling Stone in 2014, Swift explained that the song was about a fellow female singer, whom internet sleuths deduced to be Katy Perry. "For years, I was never sure if we were friends or not," Swift shared about her frenemy. "She would come up to me at awards shows and say something and walk away, and I would think, 'Are we friends, or did she just give me the harshest insult of my life?'"

Swift went on to add that this unnamed adversary did something "so horrible" that it irrevocably changed the trajectory of their relationship. More specifically, she "basically tried to sabotage an entire arena tour" and "tried to hire a bunch of people out from under [Swift]," per Rolling Stone. As Swifties know, three dancers on Swift's Red world tour left to perform on Katy Perry's Prismastic tour in 2013, per Vogue. 

On top of that, Swift and Perry used to tweet support for one another (there's the "mad love"), but that abruptly changed prior to the song's release. Swift also got in a not-so-subtle jab at Perry by adding a photo of a Grammy Award in the liner notes of her song, per The Washington Post. (As of this writing, Swift has 10 Grammy Awards while Perry has zero. Naturally, Twitter exploded.) But given all this bad blood, was there any hope of a reconciliation?

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