14 DAY TRIAL // Taylor Swift comes across as incredibly relatable and down to earth, despite her superstar status, but industry insiders talk about her as one of the most money-oriented, business-savvy, calculating young woman now working in showbiz.
Either because these appreciations of her are not true or because they go against the image she’s working hard to cultivate, Taylor takes offense with them, particularly with being described as “calculating.”
Taylor lands GQ cover, gets candid
This month’s issue of GQ magazine sees her making her debut as covergirl for the publication. The issue also brings a lengthy interview with the pop star, in which she talks, among other things, about how much she hates it when people say she’s “calculating.”
Ironically, in the next sentence, she describes herself as just that.
“Am I shooting from the hip?” she asks the interviewer, getting “flustered” for the first time since they started talking. “Would any of this have happened if I was? In that sense, I do think about things before they happen. But here was someone taking a positive thing - the fact that I think about things and that I care about my work - and trying to make that into an insinuation about my personal life. Highly offensive. You can be accidentally successful for three or four years. Accidents happen. But careers take hard work.”
Taylor also insists that whoever is calling her “calculating” is no friend of hers but someone who’s trying to damage her reputation by saying it as if it were a bad thing.
Taylor Swift, the Queen of Mean
As noted above, a lot of industry people actually think that the “Bad Blood” hitmaker is very calculating when it comes to her image. Earlier this week, Wendy Williams discussed Taylor’s rise to becoming the most followed celebrity on Instagram by describing her as the Queen of Mean.
This wasn’t as much as an offense, Williams added, because it made Taylor smarter than Beyonce and Kim Kardashian put together, i.e. the other 2 women who came hot on her heels in terms in online popularity.
Taylor deliberately tried to make herself appear more relatable, from posting photos of her friends and of her skills as a cook and a baker, to never showing herself in public in skimpy outfits, because she knew that this was something that made her stand out from the crowd.
Williams stopped short of calling Taylor a fraud, but she did make one thing very clear: this was a calculated move on part on Taylor, because that’s just how she did business.