In GQ’s annual Eye Roll Issue, the human version of Nermal from Garfield talks about all sorts of shit including how “Bad Blood” isn’t about Katy Perry and how she hates when people think she’s calculating. That’s such a calculating thing for a calculating person to say! There’s also a little story she tells about the days when she wasn’t the popular Homecoming Queen of Celebrity High. When Taylor was younger and not famous, she invited a bunch of girls to the mall and they all said they had something else to do. So Taylor’s mom took her and when they strolled through the mall, she found all those girls shopping at Victoria’s Secret. I really hope that Taylor tracked down those girls who rejected her and went to their house one by one with her Victoria’s Secret model friends to say, “Big mistake! Big! HUGE!” 
 
 During Chuck Klosterman’s GQ interview with Taylor, he brought up how he had dinner with a former acquaintance of her’s and that former acquaintance described her as calculating. (I’m going to take a wild guess and say that former acquaintance was Ed Droste of Grizzy Bear.) Chuck writes that it was the only time in their interview that Taylor seemed tripped up and flustered. Tay Tay can’t believe that anybody would ever think that she, a person who collects friends based on how many Instagram likes posting their picture will get her, is calculated. How dare all of you! She says “calculating” like it’s a bad thing. 
 
 She really, really hates the word calculating. She despises how it has become tethered to her iconography and believes the person I met has been the singular voice regurgitating this categorization. As she explains these things, her speech does not oscillate from the second mode. “Am I shooting from the hip?” she asks rhetorically. “Would any of this have happened if I was? In that sense, I do think about things before they happen. But here was someone taking a positive thing—the fact that I think about things and that I care about my work—and trying to make that into an insinuation about my personal life. Highly offensive. You can be accidentally successful for three or four years. Accidents happen. But careers take hard work.” 
 
 Chuck also brought up how everyone thinks that “Bad Blood” is about one specific person (Katy Perry). Taylor says that when Rolling Stone asked her who that song was about, she only said it was about losing a friend. According to her, her policy is to never say who her songs are about, but she said that, because she didn’t want anyone to think it’s about an ex-boyfriend. 
 
 “I never said anything that would point a finger in the specific direction of one specific person, and I can sleep at night knowing that. I knew the song would be assigned to a person, and the easiest mark was someone who I didn’t want to be labeled with this song. It was not a song about heartbreak. It was about the loss of friendship.” 
 
 Chuck called her out and let her know that nobody thought it was about a dude: 
 
 “But they would have. So I don’t necessarily care who people think it’s about. I just needed to divert them away from the easiest target. Listen to the song. It doesn’t point to any one person or any one situation. But if you’d listened to my previous four albums, you would think this was about a guy who broke my heart. And nothing could be further from the truth. It was important to show that losing friendships can be just as damaging to a person as losing a romantic relationship.” 
 
 Santo dios! It’s a pop song. She acts like she wrote the damn Da Vinci Code. We all know it’s about Katy Perry. Taylor Swift basically said it was about Katy Perry. Katy Perry thinks it’s about Katy Perry. If I played that song for my old auntie who barely knows english, she’d say, “Eso es Katy Perry.” The only reason why she called it “Bad Blood” is because her label thought that the title “Fuck That Cunt Katy Perry” was just a teensy bit off-brand for the album. ||||| Photo: WENN 
 
 Taylor Swift has responded to Grizzly Bear's Edward Droste after he described her as "terribly calculated and mean." Unsurprisingly, she strongly disagrees. 
 
 Earlier in the year, Droste sent and then deleted a series of tweets which he has since confirmed were about Swift. He wrote, "Met a celebrity I always speculated was terribly calculated and mean, and they exceeded all my expectations of rudeness and arrogance. HATE." 
 
 He later added, "If you know please don't @ the person, they see all and have the capacity and desire to destroy , seriously , please just know and lol[...] This is an eternal blind item, bc I'm too petrified of their insane power. No need to speculate, just HAD to voice my disgust." 
 
 He subsequently had a change of heart though, tweeting a page from a gossip magazine that accused Swift of giving her friends a list of dos and don'ts prior to joining her on stage. 
 
 Obsessed that people are catching on pic.twitter.com/tFe2a1EVAe — Edward Droste (@edwarddroste) July 26, 2015 
 
 @Bethany_Devlin I have a whole other story to tell, still feels unsafe tho. She frightens me genuinely — Edward Droste (@edwarddroste) July 26, 2015 
 
 Now, speaking to GQ, Swift has described the accusations - though the piece doesn't name Droste, it merely cites his accusations - as "highly offensive." 
 
 "Am I shooting from the hip?” she asked. "Would any of this have happened if I was? In that sense, I do think about things before they happen. But here was someone taking a positive thing - the fact that I think about things and that I care about my work - and trying to make that into an insinuation about my personal life. Highly offensive. You can be accidentally successful for three or four years. Accidents happen. But careers take hard work." 
 
 When asked, later in the interview, if she ever gets lonely, Swift replied, "I'm around people so much. Massive amounts of people. I do a meet-and-greet every night on the tour, and it’s 150 people. Before that, it’s a radio meet-and-greet with 40 people. After the show, it’s 30 or 40 more people. 
 
 "So then when I go home and turn on the TV, and I’ve got Monica and Chandler and Ross and Rachel and Phoebe and Joey on a Friends marathon, I don’t feel lonely. I’ve just been onstage for two hours, talking to 60,000 people about my feelings. That’s so much social stimulation. When I get home, there is not one part of me that wishes I was around other people." 
 
 Read Taylor Swift's full GQ cover story here. ||||| There’s a lot to unpack from Taylor Swift’s first-ever cover story for GQ. 
 
 Speaking with famed author Chuck Klosterman, the singer opens up about her personal life and how it intertwines with her career. Defending herself from claims that she’s “calculating” and her good deeds are “self-serving,” Swift argues that she’s more self-aware than manipulative. 
 
 She also says that, because all everyone seemingly wants to write about is her is her love life, she banned herself from the internet in 2013 despite telling her interviewer minutes later that she closely monitors what people say about her. Okay, Tay. 
 
 CREDIT: GQ 
 
 Here are other things the 25-year-old wants you to know, including who “Bad Blood” is really about (even though Klosterman himself later admits her answer has a “more than a few molecules of bullshit”). 
 
 On not reading about herself online… 
 
 I went through a few years where I just never went online and never looked at blogs. This was around 2013, when the only thing anyone wanted to write about me was about me and some guy. It was really damaging. You’re thinking, ‘Everybody goes on dates when they’re 22. It’s fine, right?’ Nope. Not when you’re in this situation, and everything you do is blown out of proportion and expanded upon. And all of a sudden, there’s an overriding opinion that doesn’t accurately reflect how you actually live your life. So I didn’t go online for a year and a half. I actually forgot my Instagram password. But now I check in and see what’s happening. In 2015, that stuff does matter. Because if enough people say the same thing about me, it becomes fact in the general public’s mind. So I monitor what people say about me, and if I see a theme, I know what that means. 
 
 On why she may seem calculated to you… 
 
 When other kids were watching normal shows, I’d watch Behind the Music. And I would see these bands that were doing so well, and I’d wonder what went wrong. I thought about this a lot. And what I established in my brain was that a lack of self-awareness was always the downfall. That was always the catalyst for the loss of relevance and the loss of ambition and the loss of great art. So self-awareness has been such a huge part of what I try to achieve on a daily basis. It’s less about reputation management and strategy and vanity than it is about trying to desperately preserve self-awareness, since that seems to be the first thing to go out the door when people find success. 
 
 On Grizzly Bear’s Ed Droste claiming he had who “hand experience” of Swift’s alleged “calculating” ways… 
 
 I do think about things before they happen. But here was someone taking a positive thing—the fact that I think about things and that I care about my work—and trying to make that into an insinuation about my personal life. Highly offensive. You can be accidentally successful for three or four years. Accidents happen. But careers take hard work. 
 
 On why she’s so obsessed with collecting friendships making her squad happen… 
 
 I honestly think my lack of female friendships in high school and middle school is why my female friendships are so important now. Because I always wanted them. It was just hard for me to have friends. 
 
 On outing who “Bad Blood” is about… 
 
 You’re in a Rolling Stone interview, and the writer says, “Who is that song about? That sounds like a really intense moment from your life.” And you sit there, and you know you’re on good terms with your ex-boyfriend, and you don’t want him—or his family—to think you’re firing shots at him. So you say, “That was about losing a friend.” And that’s basically all you say. But then people cryptically tweet about what you meant. I never said anything that would point a finger in the specific direction of one specific person, and I can sleep at night knowing that. I knew the song would be assigned to a person, and the easiest mark was someone who I didn’t want to be labeled with this song. It was not a song about heartbreak. It was about the loss of friendship. 
 
 On crying after Kanye West famously crashed her VMAs speech… 
 
 When the crowd started booing, I thought they were booing because they also believed I didn’t deserve the award. That’s where the hurt came from. I went backstage and cried, and then I had to stop crying and perform five minutes later. I just told myself I had to perform, and I tried to convince myself that maybe this wasn’t that big of a deal. But that was the most happenstance thing to ever happen in my career. And to now be in a place where Kanye and I respect each other—that’s one of my favorite things that has happened in my career. 
 
 On loneliness… 
 
 I’m around people so much. Massive amounts of people. I do a meet-and-greet every night on the tour, and it’s 150 people. Before that, it’s a radio meet-and-greet with 40 people. After the show, it’s 30 or 40 more people. So then when I go home and turn on the TV, and I’ve got Monica and Chandler and Ross and Rachel and Phoebe and Joey on a Friends marathon, I don’t feel lonely. I’ve just been onstage for two hours, talking to 60,000 people about my feelings. That’s so much social stimulation. When I get home, there is not one part of me that wishes I was around other people. 
 
 On happiness… ||||| Photo: Big Machine Records/GMA/Twitter 
 
 Apparently there are things that even Taylor Swift can’t shake off. As demonstrated by “Look What You Made Me Do,” the first lead single for her upcoming Reputation, the former country star and current pop behemoth has spent no small amount of time brooding on the hit her reputation took in summer 2016 when her statement that she had never given Kanye West permission to talk about her on his Life of Pablo single “Famous” was belied by Kim Kardashian West’s release of a recorded conversation between Swift and West in which she, well, gave Kanye permission to talk about her on “Famous.” If Swift hasn’t been thinking constantly about revenge since then, there’s no indication of it on “Look What You Made Me Do,” whose lyrics linger, then linger further, on the damage she’s suffered. 
 
 It’s grievous. She herself openly admits that it was fatal. “I rose up from the dead,” Swift sings in the pre-chorus; the bridge concludes with her announcement that the old Taylor can no longer be heard “because she’s dead.” Pop music is never not repetitive, but Swift’s repetitions, for the first time ever in her career, sound wearying instead of catchy. She talks about a revenge list, then talks again about revenge: “Maybe I got mine, but you’ll all get yours.” True, the threats could sound convincing with the right delivery — anything can sound ominous with the right delivery. But Swift’s lines start out wrapped in a melodic cadence that (matched with production that manages the neat trick of being both lurching and insubstantial) can only be described as “Disney-villain karaoke,” leaving it only when she broods monotonously in spoken word. 
 
 I don’t trust nobody and nobody trusts me 
 
 I’ll be the actress starring in your bad dreams. 
 
 For all the serpent-themed hype leading up to the launch of the song, Swift’s words lack venom, fangs, and smoothness. They have the consistency of wet flour, and their meaning could be converted into a series of impotent hisses without any loss in translation. She claims to have gotten harder, but only comes off as brittle; she says that defeat made her smarter, but sounds if she’s endlessly smarting. It’s impossible for anyone but her most die-hard fans (which are, to be fair, legion) to think that the song represents Taylor in a position of strength; more-casual listeners accustomed — over the course of five good to very good albums — to the high floor and medium ceilings of Swift’s compositions will be appalled at the depth to which she’s fallen. As far as her archnemeses Kim and Kanye go, it’s completely impossible to imagine them doing anything but laughing, hard, at “Look What You Made Me Do.” They’ve “made” Taylor Swift release the worst music of her career: What could possibly be less intimidating than that? 
 
 If the sinking, imploded sense that Swift’s song summons feels familiar to careful listeners, there’s a reason. Drake, too, was a pop juggernaut whose carefully constructed public image was damaged enough by a prolonged feud with a boisterous rap artist that he ended up making a mistrust-laced collection that signaled a decline from the total prominence he formerly enjoyed. “Look What You Made Me Do” looks to be to Taylor what “Summer Sixteen” was to Drake last year: a song heralding an upcoming album (11 weeks prior to release for Swift, 13 for Drake) whose scant handful of decent lines (her drama/karma couplet is nice enough) is saddled with anesthetic delivery and an indefensibly corny hook (Drake, if you’ll recall, was “looking for reveeeenge”). Judging solely from its lead single, Reputation already has the potential to be Taylor Swift’s Views: a collection whose stature as a commercial juggernaut fails to overshadow its more permanent character as a creative debacle. Recent history doesn’t have to repeat itself, but if it does, there’s no way to say that she didn’t have fair warning.
– During an extensive cover interview with Chuck Klosterman for GQ, the only time Taylor Swift "appears remotely flustered," Klosterman writes, is when he relays a story to her about meeting a former acquaintance of Swift's a few years back who called her "calculating." Swift "really, really hates the word calculating," Klosterman writes. "She despises how it has become tethered to her iconography and believes the person I met has been the singular voice regurgitating this categorization." Swift's defense: "Am I shooting from the hip? Would any of this have happened if I was? In that sense, I do think about things before they happen. But here was someone taking a positive thing—the fact that I think about things and that I care about my work—and trying to make that into an insinuation about my personal life. Highly offensive. You can be accidentally successful for three or four years. Accidents happen. But careers take hard work." So who are Swift and Klosterman talking about? Dlisted, Celebuzz, and Gigwise think it's likely Edward Droste, member of the indie rock band Grizzly Bear, who earlier this year called Swift not only calculating but frightening, mean, rude, and arrogant (though he at first wouldn't say who he was talking about). As for the rest of the GQ interview, Swift also discusses the rumor that her song "Bad Blood" is about Katy Perry (she basically fueled the rumor because she didn't want anyone to think the song was about one of her exes) and the VMAs moment when Kanye West stormed the stage and interrupted her acceptance speech. "That was the most happenstance thing to ever happen in my career," she says. "And to now be in a place where Kanye and I respect each other—that's one of my favorite things that has happened in my career." Click for the full piece.