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I love Joseph Kahn‘s music videos. If you’re unfamiliar with his work, he’s helmed some of the most important pop clips in history—Britney Spears’ “Toxic,” Lady Gaga’s “LoveGame,” and all the best videos from Taylor Swift’s 1989 album. He also directed Swift’s most recent video, “Look What You Made Me Do.” The man is talented—insanely talented. The “Womanizer” video is literally why I’m gay.

But goddamnit, Kahn’s talking is getting in the way of my love for his videos. First, he tweeted about how cultural appropriation is “hot” and actually not bad at all. Then, he came for the BeyHive, which is just a fundamental mistake in 2017. And now he’s pitting Swift and Beyoncé against each other for no reason at all.

Let’s back up: When Swift teased her “Look What You Made Me Do” video before the 2017 MTV Video Music Awards, people started saying she ripped off Beyoncé’s Formation era. Of course, the comparisons went away after Swift dropped the full video. Truthfully, they’re not really that similar—which Kahn said in a (very rational) tweet right before the video was released.

His latest comments about the situation, however, are not rational. Instead of putting the Bey vs. Taylor fire out for good, Kahn chose to say this in his recent interview with the Los Angeles Times:

“[‘Look What You Made Me Do’ is] not ‘Formation’ at all. They try to say she’s wearing a black
crop top and Beyoncé wore a black crop top. But they don’t realize in
2015 in ‘Bad Blood,’ Taylor Swift was wearing a black crop top. I
really do think, by the way, that Beyoncé copied ‘Bad Blood.’”

Um, what? Beyoncé copied the “Bad Blood” video? How? When? Hold up, let me conduct a thorough receipt investigation:

Still looking. Stand by.

Almost done.

There are none. At no point in Beyoncé’s Lemonade did she throw on a red wig and recruit a group of Victoria’s Secret models to wage an intergalactic war against Selena Gomez’s bob. She didn’t wear latex or knee-high boots and stomp around while Lena Dunham smoked a cigar. She didn’t have a kiki with three Hailee Steinfelds. Where is Kahn getting his info? Taylor Swift Fan Theory Tumblr?

Honestly, this is all just so dumb. Swift and Kahn silenced the Beyoncé copycat haters when they released the “Look What You Made Me Do” clip in full. The video is 100 percent original—and good! I watch it 20 times a day, minimum. The work speaks for itself.

However, these quotes will spark another war between the fandoms—and we’re creating more drama between two female artists where there really isn’t any. The criticisms of Swift’s new video were valid when we only had a five-second preview of it, but they’re not anymore. And neither is the notion that Beyoncé’s main inspiration for Lemonade was a nunchucks-wielding Cara Delevingne. Let’s not make any more bad blood.

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As Beyoncé sings on “Formation,” “you know you that b-tch when you cause all this conversation.” Never forget that the Kanye West/Taylor Swift feud actually started over a Beyoncé song. Specifically, “Single Ladies,” which Kanye famously called “one of the greatest videos of all time” (“Imma let you finish…”) while, uh, snagging Taylor’s stage time at the VMAs. Now years (what feels like decades) later the saga continues, this time with Taylor’s director getting in on the action.

First, let’s start at the beginning, which was the 2009 VMA event. After Kanye interrupted her on stage, Taylor released her song “Innocent,” which may have been inspired by the awards show confrontation, and all seemed well for a few years (he even sent her flowers!). But then Kanye referenced Taylor in his song “Famous” and used her likeness in his video, prompting her to clap back while accepting a Grammy. That’s when Kim Kardashian took to Snapchat to explain that Tay had actually given her OK to the lyric… which Taylor then denied on Instagram, claiming that she hadn’t consented to being called “that bitch” in the song. When everyone came at the Reputation songstress after that (so many snake emojis), she kinda disappeared for a year. Until Friday, when Taylor dropped “Look What You Made Me Do” (here’s a more detailed timeline), the first single from her forthcoming album.

In addition to it being widely assumed that the song is inspired by her feud with Kim and Kanye, the brief clip of the song’s accompanying video — which, naturally, will drop at tonight’s VMAs where this whole thing started — that’s been posted online instantly stirred up Beyoncé-adjacent controversy when Twitter users speculated that Taylor’s look was just a little too close to that of Queen Bey in “Formation”. Now “Look What You Made Me Do” director, frequent T. Swift collaborator Joseph Kahn, has taken to Twitter to deny the connection, tweeting that he’s worked with both Tay and Bey and the new video is not in Knowles’ “art space.”

https://twitter.com/JosephKahn/status/901272624055042048

And you know what? Point taken. We haven’t seen the full “Look What You Made Me Do” video yet, and one similar image isn’t necessarily enough to reasonably call someone out for appropriation. But this isn’t the only pre-VMAs clean-up Swift’s camp is doing; they’ve also had to deny that the release date for Reputation — November 10, 2017 — was chosen as another slight to Kanye because it falls on the 10th anniversary of his mother Donda’s death. Big Machine Records told E! News, “It is standard practice that releases come out on Fridays and we locked in this release date based on other Universal Music Group releases.

The most compelling evidence that the video and release date aren’t swipes at Bey and Ye, though? The fact that they’re not obvious digs. Taylor is pretty clear when she’s writing or talking about someone in particular. She had a crush on a boy named Drew so “Teardrops On My Guitar” mentions a boy named Drew. Her song about John Mayer is called “Dear John.” People called Taylor a snake, so now she’s wearing and selling snake-shaped rings. If she wanted to use Beyoncé’s imagery, she’d be like, sipping lemonade, and if she wanted to piss of Kanye with her release date, she’d drop an album on his birthday or something. When Taylor is taunting someone, there’s very little guesswork involved.

Besides which, as much as she’s caught up in her feuds right now, Taylor doesn’t actually need other artists’ help to generate headlines. She’s as big a star as music has, and “Look What You Made Me Do” broke streaming records on both YouTube and Spotify on its first day of release. If the pattern holds, the video will be a monster hit, too. I guess we’ll see tonight…at the mother-frickin’ VMAs.

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