CULTURE

Katy Perry Responds to Rumors That She’ll Make Music With Taylor Swift

Don’t count it out yet.


Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Nicki Minaj, Selena Gomez
Jeff Kravitz/AMA2011/Getty Images

Katy Perry—or at least the artificially intelligent version of Katy Perry who appeared on the iHeartRadio Music Awards red carpet on Thursday night—is doubling down on her commitment to put her long-standing feud with Taylor Swift behind her.

After explaining to interviewers from Entertainment Tonight that the real Perry had been replaced by an A.I. bot in honor of Pi Day (“If you tell an A.I. to calculate pi, they end up never stopping and they die,” she says), Perry was asked, in a very normal and not-at-all-unrelated follow-up, if she’d consider collaborating with Taylor Swift, who “was just on this carpet before you.”

“What about the rumors that Katy Perry and Taylor Swift could make music together?” one of the interviewers asked. (Sorry, but this just doesn’t matter in a post-“Backseat” pop-music paradigm.) These rumors, apparently, were born from a palm-tree motif that’s shown up on both singers’ social media accounts recently. “I’m open,” Perry said, adding that she’s making music with Zedd (standing just to her right). Then she slid into a botlike drone: “Open, open, open,” she went on. “I’m a lovable A.I.” The real Perry reserves the right to deny any of this ever happened.

Of course, the only reason this is remotely newsworthy is because of “Bad Blood.” Though Swift and Perry were once friends—as standout up-and-comers in an increasingly cluttered pop-music landscape—they split amid rumors that some of Swift’s backup dancers had defected to the Perry camp. Then Swift released “Bad Blood” and really doubled down on the whole squad thing; Perry released “Swish Swish” and started dating Orlando Bloom. (Max Martin produced both tracks, which, okay.) Zedd had no part in this.

But last year it seemed that the singers were both willing to let go of the feud, which wasn’t even that good in the first place. Certainly not snake-emoji worthy. Perry mailed Swift a literal olive branch and a letter addressed to “old friend,” which Swift then posted to her Instagram Stories—an acceptance if we ever saw one.

Still, while artificially intelligent Katy Perry might consider a collaboration—she’s “open, open, open,” ad infinitum, you know—a shared credit might be a little too much to ask for. Not least because what would that even sound like?

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