Not that long ago I blogged about Taylor Swift’s pretty immaculate record when it comes to well played moves in Twitter spats. Well, it seems I was tempting fate as the internet has been buzzing with Swift’s name this week, linked to all sorts of online arguments.
However, it’s not the lady herself who has been engaging in this conflict but her boyfriend, DJ Calvin Harris. The Scot – who recently bared all in just his pants for Calvin Klein – seems to have much less of a barrier than his queen of pop lady friend when it comes to letting rip – and they provide a nice little case study in terms of contrasting approaches to people who irritate you online.
So, what has been occurring? Former One Directioner Zayn Malik seems to be going a bit off the rails after quitting both his band and his relationship in as many months and now he’s taking pot shots at other celebs on Twitter. The tweet that started it all was a retweet from @femaletexts , which compared Taylor Swift to Miley Cyrus where one (Swift) was talking about withdrawing her music from Spotify and the other (Cyrus) saying that it was all cool if no one paid for her music as she had made her money. Malik then wrote “G statement”, apparently agreeing in the negative against Swift.
Now, I can’t decide whether this falls under the categories I mentioned in my last blog of ‘publicity seeking from another celebrity’ or ‘celebrities who just don’t care.’
Either way, Swift maintained the kind of dignified silence we have come to expect but boyfriend Calvin Harris certainly did not. Cue a selection of very angry tweets directed at Malik as follows: “If u don’t get what it means when a successful artist uses their celebrity to benefit every other musician and songwriter in the industry…” “While u kids are refresh voting teen choice awards there’s some poor f*cker in a basement making your new favorite record trying to survive” To which Malik posted a few choice responses, such as “so I suggest you calm your knickers before them dentures fall out” and a couple of others so littered with swear words I’m not going to repeat them here.
Harris later attempted to reconcile but there was no graceful ending as we saw when Nicki Minaj and Taylor made up online over their VMAs misunderstanding (although interestingly, Minaj actually favourited one of Malik’s tweets in the above bitter exchange…).
This isn’t the first time that Calvin Harris has engaged in uncompromising feuding on Twitter. In fact he’s had quite a few ‘incidents’ and he certainly doesn’t seem to mind getting into a situation with some of the more high profile names in showbiz, including Katy Perry and Lady Gaga.
Given that Harris is the highest paid DJ in the world it’s hard to imagine that he’s doing it for publicity purposes so we can only assume these are genuine beefs. However, he might want to take a few lessons from his Twitter-perfect girlfriend before one of these escalates and blows up into something that even he can’t contain.
