Taylor Swift's response to Nicki Minaj was faux-feminist and tone deaf

What the hell happened on Twitter last night? In a week that has witnessed Rachel Dolezal’s return, the Ashley Madison hack and those Gawker resignations, we didn’t need any more garbage news – and it’s only Wednesday. But the announcement of this year’s MTV’s Video Music Award nominees caused a flare-up in a corner of the pop music internet, when Nicki Minaj tweeted about her Anaconda video being overlooked for a video of the year nomination.

Minaj calmly posted a few tweets and did not, as some media outlets would lead you to believe, let off an Angry Black Woman stereotype “rant”. Rather, she shared her thoughts about the suckerpunch feeling we’ve all experienced when we’ve lost out on something that we worked for and wanted. The VMAs have gone from provocative and shambolic in the 80s and 90s to a cloyingly sweet, backslapping circle jerk, so Minaj’s sore-loser honesty felt refreshing.

“If I was a different ‘kind’ of artist, Anaconda would be nominated for best choreo and vid of the year as well,” she wrote before posting further tweets about how the song and video had impacted on pop culture over the past 11 months. Anaconda, whether or not it’s to your tastes, was featured in an Ellen Show sketch, broke YouTube music vertical Vevo’s record for the most streams in 24 hours – previously held by Miley Cyrus’s 2014 VMA video of the year, Wrecking Ball – and had its choreography attempted by struggling models in a Vogue series of Vine videos during New York fashion week. Of course, its butt-focused cover art also stirred up a fair amount of online controversy, and became the subject of a slew of Photoshopped memes.

But it was Minaj’s comments about how “the ‘other’ girls” release record-breaking videos and earn nominations that created a ripple of tension and misunderstanding. Though she never stated which “girls” she was talking about, plenty of people assumed she meant Taylor Swift, who’s up for nine awards this year, including video of the year for Bad Blood (which went on to break Minaj’s Vevo record).

Then it popped off. Swift tweeted at Minaj, trying to use what looked like a faux-feminist defense when Minaj was not attacking her. Minaj responded, attempting to clarify her view that “black women influence pop culture so much but are rarely rewarded for it”. She raised valid points.

They made Swift’s tweet sound like a tone-deaf reaction to a black artist trying to speak about the hypocrisy of an industry that profits from the commercialisation of parts of African American culture without rewarding the creators of those trends (see Azealia Banks’ impassioned Hot 97 interview from last year for a recent example).

Newsflash: parts of the US music industry have been built on exploitative terms for musicians, and for years white artists covered and repackaged black music to make it palatable for mainstream, segregated radio. One part of the issue Minaj raised confronts the industry’s collusion with the structures of white supremacy that would rather sanitise black art for a white audience than celebrate it in its original form. But this doesn’t feel like the place to have a nuanced conversation about race in music.

Amid all the tea-sipping, popcorn-eating jokes shared on Twitter during the exchange, we all forgot one thing: neither video is that good. Neither video deserves to be crowned video of the year by a company that once was actually relevant to music and is now the place where Catfish reruns and “teen mom” reality shows have a happy home.

Bad Blood is an overblown, drawn-out credit sequence. It manages to introduce a story arc, abandon it about 40 seconds in, and stagger to a resigned reliance on wind machines and models wearing bondage gear. The whole expensive-looking thing ends with Swift illogically squaring up to fight Selena Gomez while flames obstruct distant London skyscrapers. Next.

Anaconda is marginally better, and centres on the celebration of big butts in various, incongruous locations. Minaj earns a few extra points for promoting a variety of body types, having a sense of humour and subverting a saucy “whipped cream on breasts” sequence into one where she slices a banana into pieces (yes, men, that moment is meant to make you worry about your penises).

Even among the other nominees, this category is dry. Ed Sheeran’s Thinking Out Loud video feels like a stylised So You Think You Can Dance audition and Beyoncé’s 7/11 was shot on a phone, in a hotel. She’s beautiful and having fun, but there isn’t much happening in the way of concept. Only Kendrick Lamar’s politically inclined Alright, budget CGI included, and the colourful, joyful silliness of Mark Ronson’s Uptown Funk featuring Bruno Mars deserve their nods.

If this category were about anything other than trolling everyone, Björk’s 360-degree video for Stonemilker would be up. Or we’d have seen a nomination for Azealia Banks’ webcam-interactive Wallace video. Or Shamir’s playful, puppet-filled video for Call it Off. For that matter, we could ask where Rihanna’s Bitch Better Have My Money nomination went, unless she missed the deadline by a day.

I’m all for important discussions on the state of authorship and recognition for black artists in pop – but as Swift’s tweet showed, couching those analyses in something as pointless as the VMAs soon sidetracks the conversation. That, I suppose, is the one thing I learned from Twitter Tuesday night.