Taylor Swift is under fire.
For, despite seeing her new album ‘Reputation’ soar to brilliant commercial heights, the entertainer’s alleged backstage shenanigans continue to rub fans of her alleged victims the wrong way.
The latest fan base to take on the supposed snake.
Kanye West‘s.
Some fans believe that ‘Reputation’, which was inspired by her feud with West, was released on the tenth anniversary of the death of his mother to spite him.
So, led by Kanye super fan Rhys Halkidis, the base decided to launch ‘Hey Mama’ day.
Group members decided that streaming a single Kanye West song en masse on November 10, so that it attained more spins than anything on Reputation, would be an effective way to fight back against Swift’s alleged messiness. They toyed with using “Famous,” the misogynistic Life of Pablosingle that reignited the Ye-Tay feud last year, but instead settled on “Hey Mama,” the Late Registration ode to Donda West that took on greater poignancy after her untimely death (it’s also a clearly superior song). “It just seemed like more a positive effort than being petty and fighting pettiness with pettiness,” Halkidis says.
Days after the Reputation announcement, Halkidis created a Facebook event called “Hey Mama” Day and invited his friends to join. Halkidis and the other event administrators realized that topping the Billboard charts would be a tall order, so they set a more modest goal: beating Swift on the daily Spotify charts. Halkidis did the math—if he could get about 30,000 people to stream “Hey Mama” for 12 hours straight, they’d collectively attain more than 4 million streams. That’d be enough to match Swift’s numbers on August 27 for her lead single, “Look What You Made Me Do.” “Obviously the dream is to be no. 1,” Halkidis told me shortly before the campaign started. “That’s a massive mountain to climb.”
How the plan fared?
Very well.
By the time the dust had settled on Saturday morning, fans had nudged the “Hey Mama” stream count on Spotify up from 23.6 million to 24.3 million, or about 700,000 spins. That would seemingly be enough to land the song on Spotify’s daily Top 200 list, which bottoms out just below 500,000 streams.
How do you feel about it all?