Pop music’s sweetheart Taylor Swift recently collaborated with hit singer Ice Spice on a remix of her song Karma, a tune all about allowing your enemies to defeat themselves with their own bad karma.
The original version had become an empowering anthem for those who do right by themselves and others, and feel protected knowing that they have earned good karma.
Swift sings: “I keep my side of the street clean, you wouldn’t know what I mean,” before adding: “Karma’s a relaxing thought, aren’t you envious that for you it’s not?”
When it was first released, Swift described Karma as being written “from a perspective of feeling really happy, really proud of the way your life is, feeling like this must be a reward for doing stuff right.” while talking to iHeartRadio.
She had added: “It’s a song that I really love because I think we all need some of those moments, we can’t just be beating ourselves up all the time. You have to have these moments where you’re like, ‘You know what? Karma is my boyfriend,’ and that’s it.”
karma is a cute pop song no way some of yall expected hard hitting bars like bad blood remix on this song i think ice spice did a great job with her part and did justice to the og with this remix pic.twitter.com/RQNSLhidD5
— nick | sntv (@nickputation) May 26, 2023
The karma remix should have been kept in the vault pic.twitter.com/VVgBDiEytn
— chloe ꫂৎ (@kissyangelsue) May 26, 2023
Ice Spice’s addition to the song included the lines: “Karma is your checks about to bounce, Karma is the fire in your house, and she about to pop up unannounced, and she never leaving you alone”.
The song came shortly after The 1975 frontman Matt Healy, who Swift is reported to be dating, participated in a derogatory conversation discussing Ice Spice’s face and body on The Adam Freidland Show.
Since then, Healy has apologised to the rapper on stage while in Auckland, New Zealand, saying: “Ice Spice, I’m sorry. It’s not because I’m annoyed that me joking got misconstrued. It’s because I don’t want Ice Spice to think I’m a d*ck. I love you, Ice Spice. I’m so sorry.”
With the remix being announced just a matter of weeks later, some music lovers believe that the collaboration was a PR stunt. For instance, one social media user said: “So [I] feel like the quality of that karma collab just confirmed even more it was all a PR stunt put together within the week like.”
Others have expressed a lot of disappointment about the collaboration’s outcome in general, too.
One Twitter user shared: “Wait people were actually expecting the karma remix to be good????? I thought we all knew this would be a mess”.
We had two days of viral tweets and news articles calling the Karma remix a PR stunt by Taylor only for Ice Spice to be the one to reach out first. You really can’t make this up
— Chris Swiftie™ (@HuffleBoy) May 26, 2023
I love taylor so much but my honest reaction to Karma Remix FT Ice Spice was literally this:
— Ron Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) (@segomezswift) May 26, 2023
https://t.co/YELATetPhF
Another said: “There’s like 0 chance of saving that karma remix…[I] am genuinely shocked Taylor heard it and said yes. [Definitely] one of the worst remixes ever made”.
A third added: “The karma remix should have been kept in the vault”, and a Swiftie chimed in: “Streets saying karma is the reason why that remix suck”.
Ice spice verse on karma is so bad pic.twitter.com/Mj3cd54LPk
— yes bitch yes bitch yes bitch. SLAY! (@tthankunextt) May 26, 2023
this karma ft ice spice remix….. pic.twitter.com/Pyzpucnaf0
— #MunchOnThat (@theeeoniy) May 26, 2023
