Taylor Swift can’t be kept down for long.
Fresh off of a countersuit win against former radio host David Mueller, who the jury found guilty of assaulting Swift back in 2013, Swift deleted all of the posts from her social media accounts and let her profile pictures default to gray–that was last week. Today, Swift put up a single 10-second video on Instagram and Twitter. And it features what appears to be a snake, slapping its tail forcefully on the ground amidst retro, VHS-tape quality editing.
Now, Swift has a complex history with the snake as a symbol. If you recall, Kanye West wrote a song for his 2016 album Life of Pablo called “Famous.” It featured the now iconic line, “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex. I made that bitch famous.”
Swift’s representatives released this statement in response: “Kanye did not call for approval, but to ask Taylor to release his single ‘Famous’ on her Twitter account. She declined and cautioned him about releasing a song with such a strong misogynistic message. Taylor was never made aware of the actual lyric, ‘I made that bitch famous.'”
Last summer, Kim Kardashian West released evidence via Snapchat that told a different story. The phone recording of Kanye and Swift’s conversation contained Kanye asking for Swift’s approval, and Swift being in on the joke. Later, Swift would write another iconic line in her defense: “I would very much like to be excluded from this narrative.”
But Swift haters immediately stormed her social media with snake emojis, implying that she was a sneaky snake with a hidden agenda. Instagram itself stepped in, censoring the emojis from her feed. With today’s video drop, she appears to be reclaiming the emoji for her own devices.
It’s pretty auspicious timing. In case you’ve been living under a rock, we’re having an eclipse this afternoon. BuzzFeed has a very thorough investigation into what this means in relation to Swift. But it doesn’t take an investigation to see that Swift could very well be taking advantage of a rare event to drop a new single for her sixth album.
ALSO, today happens to be the day that other feud-ee Katy Perry dropped a preview for the music video for “Swish Swish,” a song that is almost definitely about Swift. The video will feature two celebrity-heavy basketball teams playing against each other. That sounds a lot like Swift’s 1989 video for “Bad Blood,” but with, you know, basketball.
Swift has already proved she likes to steal Perry’s thunder, like when she released her entire catalog to Spotify on the same day Perry’s album came out.
In conclusion, by this afternoon we very well could have a new Taylor Swift song to stream. As you’re protecting your eyes by not looking directly at the sun around 2:45 p.m. EST, keep refreshing Spotify/Apple Music/Tidal.
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