Taylor Swift’s Ultimate Revenge on Kanye West with New Album

Taylor Swift’s newly announced album The Life of a Showgirl hasn’t even dropped yet, but social media users are convinced it contains a sly jab toward her longtime rival Kanye West. 

After announcing her latest project earlier this week, fans of the pop star, 35, couldn’t help but notice the title’s striking similarity to West’s 2016 album The Life of Pablo. 

One TikTok user was quick to point out that when you start typing the title into Apple Music, Swift’s record, now, appears before West’s. 

Adding fuel to the theory, the record’s cover art features orange tones, the same color palette as The Life of Pablo.

‘Am I going crazy or did anyone else notice that??? and his album was orange … bye she’s perfect,’ the TikToker wrote. 

The comments section backed them up, with one fan declaring, ‘MASTERMIND,’ and another adding, ‘She really is a mastermind and I love that about her lol.’

The 14-time Grammy winner and rapper’s infamous beef began at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, when West stormed the stage during her acceptance speech for Best Female Music Video to argue that Beyoncé deserved the trophy instead.

West emerged on the stage and took the microphone from Swift, telling her, ‘Yo, Taylor, I’m really happy for you, I’mma let you finish. But Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all-time! One of the best videos of all-time.’ 

While the musical stars appeared to be on better terms in the years following – they were pictured at a number of events in the years after – things blew up after the release of Kanye’s 2016 song Famous. 

West claimed at the time that Swift had given him her blessing to refer to her as a ‘B****’ in the lyrics of the song, in a reference to the VMAs incident. 

Swift said she never made such an agreement, leading to a public feud with West after he and his then-wife Kim Kardashian who publicly accused Swift of lying, before leaking a partial phone call between the two.

Later, a leaked video appeared to have proven Taylor told the truth about her phone call with West over his controversial song.

The new clip that surfaced on social media appears to show West didn’t consult Swift about the ‘b****’ lyric, and only asked her about the other line in the song, which was previously mentioned by Kardashian

While defending themselves in the past the former couple did not mention the ‘b***’ lyric, apparently because they knew the phone conversation with Taylor did not touch upon it.

 In the footage which was shared on X, West can be seen informing Swift he is writing a song about her and asked her if she could add hype to the song by tweeting it out.

West tells her: ‘It has a very controversial line at the beginning of the song about you.’

West then told Swift she ‘sounded sad’, and the singer questioned if the lyrics were ‘mean’, to which he reassured her he didn’t think they were.

Explaining the context to the lyrics he explains: ‘It says, uh… and the funny thing, when I first played it and my wife heard it, she was like, “Huh? What, that’s too crazy,”

‘And then when Ninja from Die Atwoord hear it, he was like “Oh my god, this is the craziest s**t, this is why I love Kanye…” and now, it’s like my wife’s favourite f***ing line… I just wanted to give you some premise of that.’

He then says the lyric: ‘To all my Southside n***as that know me best / I feel like Taylor Swift might owe me sex.’

Swift laughs and says: ‘That’s not mean.’

‘OK, well this is the thing why I’m calling you, because you got an army, you own a country of motherf***ing 2bn people, basically,’ West says.

‘If you felt that it’s funny and cool and hip hop, and felt like it’s the College Dropout and Ye that you love, people would be way into it, and that’s why I think it’s super genius to have you be the one that says, ‘Oh I like this song a lot… this is cool.’

Swift then tells West she needs some time to think about it, adding: ‘When you hear something for the first time you need to think about it, because it is absolutely crazy.’

There is no mention West would call her a ‘b***h’ or suggest he ‘made her famous’ during the phone call.

In a separate clip which is circulating on Twitter which appears to be from the same call, Swift tells him: ‘I [sold] a full 7m of that album before you did that, which is what happened.’

In 2019, Swift revealed to Vogue that she dealt with the high-profile scandal by channeling her pain and anger into her material.

‘A mass public shaming, with millions of people saying you are quote-unquote canceled, is a very isolating experience,’ she said of the difficult time.

‘You’re sending mass amounts of messaging to this person to either shut up, disappear, or it could also be perceived as, “Kill yourself.”‘

As she navigated the scandal, which inspired the tracks This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things and Look What You Made Me Do, Swift explained she ‘immediately’ knew she had to ‘make music.’

‘I knew it was the only way I could survive it,’ Swift told the outlet. ‘It was the only way I could preserve my mental health and also tell the story of what it’s like to go through something so humiliating.’

In December 2023, Swift slammed Kardashian for ‘taking her down psychologically’ and forcing her into hiding.

‘I moved to a foreign country. I didn’t leave a rental house for a year. I was afraid to get on phone calls,’ she said during her interview for TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year.

During that period, she all but vanished from the public eye, something that she says came as a result of the Kardashian and West fallout.

‘I pushed away most people in my life because I didn’t trust anyone anymore. I went down really, really hard.’

‘I thought that moment of backlash was going to define me negatively for the rest of my life,’ she explained.

Yet, in the years that followed, Swift’s career has only gone from strength to strength – while West has disgraced himself by making anti-Semitic remarks.