Taylor Swift, Ice Spice, 'Karma' & The Frustrating Selfishness of White Feminism

If Taylor Swift was going to blatantly flaunt the insidious self-serving nature of her white feminism, she could have at least done us the courtesy of making a listenable song. For the latest repackaging of her monumental Midnights album, the “Anti-Hero” singer tapped Bronx rapper Ice Spice, mainstream hip-hop’s brightest new star, for a remix of “Karma,” the set’s latest radio single.

It’s hard not to read the “Karma” remix as insidious or sinister. Sure, the remix could have been proposed and recorded back when Ice Spice and Pink Pantheress (who scored a smash hit in the U.S. and U.K. this year alongside Ice with “Boy’s A Liar, Pt. 2”) presented Swift an award at the 2023 iHeartRadio Music Awards, or even prior to that event, but the “Karma” remix simply cannot be divorced from the context in which it has debuted. At best, the remix could have landed as a hip collaboration that brings Taylor’s support for rising female rappers full circle — remember her being one of pop music’s earliest and most vocal supporters of Nicki Minaj’s “Super Bass” a decade ago? At worst, the remix could have landed as a desperate attempt to remain squarely in an increasingly fast-paced social media zeitgeist by latching onto Gen Z’s “Princess Diana.” Instead, the outcome is something even more perverse. Taylor has turned her latest Midnights single into a PR Band-Aid for her racist and misogynist new lover Matty Healy of The 1975.

Earlier this year, during an appearance on The Adam Friedland Show — which has since been removed from streaming platforms — Healy laughed as the two podcast hosts, Nick Mullen and the titular Friedland, discussed Ice Spice using derogatory terms concerning her body, ethnicity, and intelligence. The 34-year-old 1975 frontman chortled along as the hosts called the “Bikini Bottom” rapper an “Inuit Spice Girl,” “dumb,” and a “chubby Chinese lady” as they employed racist caricatures of Chinese and Hawaiian accents. Later in the episode, Healy asks the hosts to mimic Japanese people working in concentration camps and even mocks the Japanese accent himself. Mind you, the only reason Ice Spice was even a topic of conversation was that she had recently praised The 1975’s music in an interview. This all follows weeks of an endlessly controversial tour during which Healy performed “ironic” Nazi salutes and randomly mouth-kissed fans. Needless to say, Swift’s new beau is an asshole.

Now, when it comes to Taylor Swift, she’s in a very rare and very precarious stage in her career right now. A testament to her career longevity, the “All Too Well” singer is in the midst of another imperial phase — which I’ll loosely define as the period when an artist is at their commercial peak which often, but does not always, coincide with their creative peak. Midnights is no one’s classic; it’s far from Swift’s best album, and it’s not even her best pop album. Nonetheless, the record earned her the biggest first-week sales total of her career and made her the first and only artist to simultaneously hold the top ten spots on the Billboard Hot 100. Moreover, her record-breaking Eras Tour is pretty much guaranteed to rewrite several records in the history books. But an imperial phase, second wind or not, does not mean that an artist is infallible. And Taylor Swift knows that.

As Swift transitioned from country to pop and became a Pop Star™, she began to develop some level of forward-facing political consciousness. The Taylor Swift we know today is the quintessential white liberal feminist. Her politics are vapid at best, but mostly just self-serving. She’ll create an award-winning music video anchored by the presence and performance of drag queens but remain silent on legislation that is actively vilifying, othering, and harming that community. Taylor’s feminism really only applies to her and her handpicked girl squad. There’s the time she endorsed the Women’s March after staying largely silent during the 2016 election, or when she centered herself and spoke over Nicki Minaj when the “Red Ruby Da Sleaze” rapper critiqued how black women’s sexuality is policed in the realm of popular music and culture, and now, she’s using another woman to clean up her boyfriend’s endless trail of mess. Like any great pop star, Taylor’s politics are inconsistent, but, as a general buying public, we’re largely willing to let a few things slide when an artist is in their imperial phase. We do it for everyone who reaches that point, to some degree. That’s kind of the point of it being a commercial peak. But Swift knows just as well as we do that the woman who has liberal white America wrapped around her finger cannot be romantically linked with someone as flippantly abhorrent as Matty Healy.

So, what does Swift do? Not only does she enlist the specific Black woman that Healy helped target, she deliberately unleashes the remix just as speculation about the validity of her and Healy’s relationship is reaching a fever pitch. From meet-ups with her family to allegations that the pair are now smooching in public, it looks like Healy is here to stay — but not at the expense of the strength of Swift’s brand, if she can help it, that is. The nastiest part of it all is that Taylor has yet to comment on anything. She has chosen to remain silent on everything related to Matty Healy. Remaining complicit in the elevation of Matt Healy’s stardom and platform without explicitly condemning his racism and misogyny does not disappear because you put Ice Spice on a terribly mastered remix. Of course the “Karma” remix reeks of damage control, it is damage control. But it’s not just damage control for Healy (if that were the case, surely we’d get more than a half-baked non-apology on his end), it’s also damage control for Swift’s brand — and that’s why this whole thing is so transparent. The capitalist hellscape that is the pop music industry is easy to catch onto; to pretend as if the “Karma” remix exists in a vacuum is as irresponsible as it is insulting.

Ultimately, it’s a win for Ice Spice. She’s following up “Boy’s A Liar, Pt. 2” and the Nicki Minaj-assisted “Princess Diana” with a collaboration that will ensure her both increased pop star legitimacy and commercial success. It’s a shame that this moment has to be clouded by the selfishness of white feminism and Matty Healy’s overall nastiness. In Swift’s own words, “Band-Aids don’t fix bullet holes,” and her silence, and thus her complicity, will be far more remembered than this execrable throwaway remix.

Vote for Taylor Swift and Ice Spice at the 2023 Bulletin Awards.