When exactly did Taylor Swift become Taylor Swift?
“Taylor Swift is the most successful music artist of all time,” reads a caption at the beginning of the documentary.
Immediately after, here are the images of the record-breaking “Eras tour”, 1 billion dollars grossed last year in the United States alone, with fans camped outside the stadiums, ready to attend the first concerts of their darling in five years. Now, however, the music becomes dark, gloomy, anxiety-inducing, like in a report from “Quinta colonna”: “But in November 2019, a battle began that threatened her career”. It begins like this “.Taylor Swift vs Scooter Braun: Bad blood”, the documentary in two parts, one dedicated to the pop star and the other to the powerful manager, which tells the $300 million fight that divided the music industry. The documentary has also arrived in Italy, streaming for a few days on discovery+. Behind it is the British director Kate Siney, who has worked for the BBC, National Geographic and Channel 4 and who last year signed the beautiful docu-film “When Blondie came to Britain”, on the rise of the band of “Heart of glass” icon of the new wave of the mid 70s. This time she has handled a decidedly more complex subject: the war between “Goliath against Goliath” that has shaken the music biz.
It was the summer of 2019 when Scooter Braun, American entrepreneur and manager of some of the most influential artists in the music business, from Justin Bieber to Ariana Grande, acquired the record label Big Machine Recordsfounded by the former promoter Scott Borchettaand with it the masters of Taylor Swift’s first six albums. Here we need to open a parenthesis. Because there has never been any love lost between Taylor Swift and Scooter Braun. Among the historic artists on Braun’s roster there is also that Kanye West that in 2009 at Video Music Awards stormed the stage during Taylor Swift’s award ceremony for “Best Female Video”, claiming that the statuette belonged to Beyoncé.
West has always had a sort of “.obsession” towards Swift. In 2016, seven years after the incident at the VMAs, in the lyrics of the single “Famous” the rapper let loose some really unkind words towards the pop star (“I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / Why? / Well, I made her famous”). And the video also featured a naked mannequin in Swift’s likeness. Following Scooter Braun’s acquisition of the master tapes of her albums, Taylor Swift posted a long post on social media in which she lashed out at both Braun and her former record producer and mentor Scott Borchetta.: “Now Scooter, after bullying me for years, It deprived me of my life’s work that I was not given the opportunity to buy. In essence, my musical legacy is about to end up in the hands of someone who has attempted to demolish it.” And addressing Borchetta: “This is what happens when you sign a 15-year contract with someone for whom the term ‘fidelity’ is clearly just a contractual concept.. And when that man says ‘music has value,’ he means value to the men who didn’t create it. When I left my masters in Scott Borchetta’s hands, I accepted the fact that he could sell them. But never in my worst nightmares did I imagine that the buyer would be Scooter.”
The poster of “Taylor Swift vs Scooter Braun: Bad blood”
Taylor Swift returned to the story several times via her social media channels, making it a battle over artist control of music. Until Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings LLC sold the masters to Shamrock Holdings – a private equity group owned by Disney – in November 2020 300 million dollars The pop star revealed that her team was initially in talks with Braun to buy the masters, but that she walked away after the entrepreneur asked her to sign a “blacklist agreement”: “I could never say another word about Scooter Braun, unless it was positive.”
At that point, according to Swift, the entrepreneur allegedly prevented new buyers from contacting her until the deal was reached: “.This is the second time my music has been sold without my knowledge.”. With unprecedented media coverage for a business deal, the story has turned into what some argue is a classic example of exploitation of women in the entertainment industry, while others argue that Taylor egged on her fan base for the sole purpose of reneging on a deal she didn’t like.
“Taylor Swift vs Scooter Braun: Bad blood” shows exclusively interviews with lawyers, journalists and people close to Swift or Braun, delving into the complexities surrounding music rights, gender dynamics in the industry and the influence of fanscovering all aspects of that feud that is said to have irrevocably changed the music industry. But beyond all this, the documentary is interesting because it shows the exact moment in Taylor Swift’s career when the pop star became the war machine we all know todaysuper careful about her public image and intent on not losing even an inch of the multi-million dollar empire she has built in recent years (in November 2020 Swift
he began re-recording his old songsas permitted by the contract he signed in 2005, inaugurating the series of “Taylor’s version“, or re-releases of his old records). “He’s turned something that to most people is a really incomprehensible, unbelievable situation, like when you’re fighting a board of directors and a record label, into something very relatable: ‘I made the songs, I created them, I wrote them, I sang them, I deserve to own them,’” says Vice journalist Zing Tsjeng. Jennifer Otter Bickerdike, a media and music expert who specializes in fandom, celebrity worship and pop culture (she has worked for the Guardian, Discovery Channel and the BBC), explains: “One really interesting thing about the Taylor Swift phenomenon is that everything seems perfectly orchestrated to perfectly control the story and the brand.”. And Nola Ojomu, senior entertainment reporter for the Daily Mail, adds: “It’s a really interesting phenomenon, where she’s the victim but she’s also always been the winner, as if she always manages to get the upper hand in the end. She always takes revenge. And she herself joked about it, she said it in her songs, ‘Karma’, ‘look what you made me do’. She waits and plans her revenge that once realized is perfect“.
