Taylor Swift won an acrimonious battle to perform her old songs live at the American Music Awards. It may be a sign she's winning the PR war over her catalog as well.
On Sunday night, Swift was named the AMA's Artist of Decade at the show. But many fans tuning in did so to see the latest twist in the heated battle between Swift and the amalgam of music and private equity interests that commandeered her back catalog on her old label Big Machine. That battle pitted Swift _ now signed to Republic _ against Scooter Braun, the mega-manager behind Kanye West, Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande and others. Braun and Big Machine founder Scott Borchetta helped orchestrate the sale of Big Machine and most of her masters to Ithaca Holdings, a media group Braun controls.
Swifts' fight to control her back catalog is byzantine to say the least. But a threat from Swift to re-record her old albums to undercut Braun seems to have sufficiently alarmed Braun as to raise the specter of forbidding her from playing the majority of her hits on the telecast during a planned retrospective medley.
Swift wrote on Tumblr that the sale of Big Machine left her longtime foes in the position of "controlling a woman who didn't want to be associated with them. In perpetuity."
Braun denied the threat, but Swift's pained public posts about the ordeal earned support from a huge array of stars and politicians such as Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who used the occasion to attack private equity groups such as the Carlyle Group, which helped fund Braun and Borchetta's purchase. Swift's pleas sent fans on a campaign to free her from any impositions from Braun and his group (Braun, for his part, said that he'd been harassed and threatened with doxing).
At the AMAs though, Swift left the dispute as subtext in a medley of some of her biggest hits of the last decade.
Swift was introduced by Carole King, who said she "is one of the only modern pop artists whose name appears as the sole songwriter in her song credits. Her lyrics resonate across the generations. Her songs touch everyone, her impact around the world is extraordinary." And, in perhaps a subtle allusion to her current predicament, King added that "The best is yet to come."
Swift's medley was indeed a walk through her career growing up alongside her fans, but to hear those songs in this context, it almost seemed like she'd been preparing for industry combat her whole life. She started with "The Man," from her new album "Lover," and its lyrics about mistreatment and being undermined by men were clear as a bell: "I'm so sick of running as fast as I can / wondering if I'd get there quicker if I was a man."
She then walked through the decade of hits _ "Love Story," "I Knew You Were Trouble," "Blank Space" _ which had Billie Eilish singing every word in the aisle, and ballet stars Misty Copeland and Craig Hall dancing alongside her onstage. But she saved particular relish for "Shake It Off," where she castigated the "Liars and dirty cheats of the world" with an unmistakably acidic flourish. The AMA crowd was hers, and they seemed to know to whom those words were addressed.
She didn't overtly address the dispute in her acceptance speech, instead taking the occasion to tell King, "When I fell in love with music, I realized how marvelous it was that an artist could transcend so many changes and phases in people's lives. You taught me that was a possibility.
"All any of want is to create something that will last," she added. "All that matters to me is the memories I've had with you guys over the years."
