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Video length: 4 min
8:30 p.m. Sunday April 21, 2024_marc levy taylor swift – H264.mp4
Having become the most listened to artist in the world, Taylor Swift almost ended her career in 2016, following a clash with rapper Kanye West. A challenge that the pop star was able to overcome and return to her advantage.
After a record-breaking year, nothing can stop the “Taylor Swift phenomenon”. The American superstar, who recently became a billionaire thanks to his world tour “The Eras Tour”, has just released a new album on April 19, The Tortured Poets Department, already assured of being at the top of the rankings. However, a few years ago, few music professionals would have counted on such success. While she was beginning to make a name for herself in the profession, the young singer experienced an event whose consequences could have ended her career.
In September 2009, Taylor Swift is happy. At 20 years old, the young pop country artist has just received, in front of an audience of stars, the prize for video of the year at the MTV Videos Music Awards. On stage at Radio City Music Hall in New York, she began to thank her parents and her producer when Kanye West, who was at the time one of the biggest American rappers, interrupted her and took the microphone from her hands. . “I’m very happy for you and I’ll let you finish, but Beyoncé made the best music video ever“, he says in front of a stunned audience and an embarrassed Beyoncé. After his scandal, the rapper leaves the stage, leaving the young singer dazed and humiliated.
Taylor Swift disappears for a year
Later, under media pressure, Kanye West apologized but in 2016, he repeated his provocations. In the music video for its title famous, he’s lying in bed surrounded by naked celebrities, including a Taylor Swift lookalike. The images scroll and the rapper’s words are unequivocal: “JI can always sleep with Taylor, I made that bitch famous.“The video caused a scandal and to justify himself, Kanye West publicly assured that the singer gave him permission to use her name and image in the clip.
While the pop star denied it, Kim Kardashian, at the time the rapper’s wife, published on the Internet the extract of a telephone conversation between the two music stars discussing certain details of the video. The public immediately turns against Taylor Swift and America’s little bride appears as a manipulator and a liar. Overnight, the singer disappears and closes her Instagram account.
His masterstroke marks the turning point in his career
It was only a year later, in 2017, that Taylor Swift returned, but it was no longer the same. Dressed in black and made up with thick eyeliner, the star intends to regain control of her career. In the clip of Look What You Made Me Doshe buries the young, ingenuous Taylor to bring out from the ground a combative Taylor who wants to reestablish the truth, and sings “I will be the main actress in your nightmares.”
In 2019, the singer, more determined than ever, went further: when she learned that a producer close to Kanye West had bought the rights to her first six albums, she decided to re-record them with the mention “Taylor’s Version”. And the fans play the game, they buy the albums, the reissue of 1989 (Taylor’s Version) will even beat its own sales record in less than a week. For Mathilde Serrell, journalist at France Inter, this decision marks a turning point in her career: “Cit’s something that will bring together a new audience, garner additional income, she’s making history with this one“.
Today, Taylor Swift has become the most powerful artist in the music industry. And even if she managed to transcend the trials, she admitted, in December 2023 in an interview with the magazine Time, who crowned her personality of the year, that this episode had serious repercussions on her mental health: ” It made me psychologically fall into a place I had never been before. I moved to a foreign country. I didn’t move out of a rental house for a year. I was afraid to call. I pushed away most people in my life because I no longer trusted anyone. I went down very, very hard.”
Excerpt from “The Taylor Swift story”, broadcast in “8:30 p.m. on Sunday”, 21 April 2024.
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