When you think of rap, Taylor Swift probably isn't the first name to spring to mind. With her femme cadence, poppy melodies and yearning lyrics, in many ways, Swift embodies the antithesis of rap culture (as she herself satirized in ‘Thug Story’ in 2009.)
You would therefore be forgiven for assuming that the Taylor Swift x rapper Venn diagram rarely meets in the middle: that rappers want little to do with Swift, and vice versa. You would be wrong. The rappers who have linked up with or mentioned Taylor (in their lyrics or elsewhere) include Future, Ice Spice, Nicki Minaj, Ye, T-Pain, Travis Scott, Eminem, Kendrick Lamar, Drake, and Flavour Flav. And a lot of the time, their take is flattering: On Red Button Drake quipped, “Taylor Swift the only n***a that I ever rated. Only one could make me drop the album just a little later,” while Eminem spat “next to Taylor Swift, and that Iggy Ho, you about to really blow” on Killshot.
Clearly—bar (pun intended) the infamous Kanye feud—a lot of rappers are...Swifties? Tbf, Taylor Swift is one of the most successful people in the world: She was the first artist to win Album of the Year at the Grammys four times; in 2022, the first-ever artist to occupy the entire Top 10 on the Hot 100; her recent Eras tour grossed $1.04b and boosted local economies globally. Basically, she's swimming in power and influence, and few people would want to get on the wrong side of that kind of industry monopoly.
Indeed, wronging Swift is a risky move. The two people she had her most notable feuds with— Scooter Braun and Ye—didn’t exactly come out unscathed. Braun had to step down from music management after losing a lot of his most high-profile clients, while Kanye…well, in Taylor’s words, “if you wait long enough, the trash takes itself out.” And Swift is hyper-aware of her reputation, having acknowledged on the self-aware Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me: "Isn't that what they all say? That I’ll sue you, if you step on my lawn, that I’m fearsome, and I’m wretched and I'm wrong.”
With over half of US adults copping to being Taylor Swift fans, Swift has a vast market in the palm of her hand, and one that doesn’t have a huge rapper crossover (though there are undoubtedly an elite few who have Giggs and Taylor sharing real estate on their playlists). As such, a collaboration with Swift is a savvy business move—an opportunity to tap into her predominantly white, millennial, suburban-living fanbase. Basically, a collab with, or shoutout from Taylor is a guaranteed mainstream hit: just look at Bad Blood ft. Kendrick Lamar (which was the rapper’s first song on the Billboard Hot 100), Fortnite ft. Post Malone, and Karma ft. Ice Spice. Nicki Manaj even credited Swift with being the reason Super Bass became so successful.
Swift is also one of the most heavily covered artists in the media, with a lot of platforms having a designated Taylor Swift journalist. And coverage of the artist isn’t limited to music publications and glossy magazines—her name is a headline mainstay in legacy media outlets like The New York Times and The Guardian. A collaboration with her— or even the mention of her name — translates to press coverage, a spike in Google searches, and swaths of people not familiar with the rap game coming across your name.
And this publicity isn’t limited to old media: Swifites are terminally online, with everything the singer does being subject to easter egg hunts from legions of overzealous fan accounts. So being mentioned in the same breath as Swift means a rapper’s name will circulate among the Swift-verse at lightning speed. And Swift’s fans are loyal: if she gives someone her stamp of approval—or they speak well of her—they’ll take note.
Of course, more goes into rappers’ obsession with Swift than being sycophantic. Perhaps the biggest draw to Swift is her confessional and metaphorical songwriting, which therapists all over the US have attested help patients through hard times. And no one respects lyrical genius more than rappers.
So who will join forces with Taylor next? Although a collaboration with Ye was rumoured for the re-release of Reputation, given West’s disgraced public image, that’s looking unlikely. Travis Scott, however, recently said he was keen to collaborate with Swift ("I would love to get Taylor Swift or Sabrina Carpenter on a hook. I have some ill ideas,” he told Billboard.) And given that both Scott and Swift have critiqued the pressures of fame through their lyrics (if with sharply diverging backing melodies), we’d be interested in seeing them come together to highlight the perils of the limelight, particularly in the internet age.
