1 day Ago By Chris Willman
Zach Bryan has ghosted X (formerly Twitter), at least for now, after stirring up a hornet’s next by tweeting out a preference for Kanye West over Taylor Swift — a post he subsequently apologized for, saying he was drunk at the time. The superstar singer-songwriter’s tweets sometimes go back and forth across the line between playful and outrightly provocative, and Tuesday night’s Ye/Swift tweet was clearly designed to get a rise out of people, however mirthfully it may have been intended. The original tweet first offered a mild diss of Swift boyfriend Travis Kelce’s football team — “eagles > chiefs” — and then followed that with “Kanye > Taylor.
.. Who’s with me.
” Between Swift’s status as the most popular singer in the world and Ye’s as the music world’s most vilified antisemite, Bryan surely knew he was going to get a reaction, and he got one. Wednesday, he deactivated his account, but not before offering a mea culpa before going dark on the platform. “Guys I love Taylor,” Bryan claimed in his followup tweet.
He said he “was listening to TTPD [‘The Tortured Poets Department’] last night and ‘Thank You Aimee’ came on and I drunkenly tweeted that about Kanye. If anyone took it serious please know I love both artists a lot and think we’re in a really beautiful time of music.” The Swift song referred to by Bryan has been widely seen as a diss track against Kim Kardashian, as a delayed response to the accusations that the reality star publicly lobbed at Swift in 2017, in defense of West, her then-husband.
Although he exited X, Bryan did not deactivate his Instagram account. There, he left evidence that his listening habits have been more consumed by Ye more than Swift, despite his declaration on the other platform that he’d been listening to “Tortured Poets.” On his Story, Bryan posted screenshots of three West songs he’d been calling up and apparently enjoying on Spotify, including “I Thought About Killing Somebody.
” As of this writing, Bryan’s X page reads “This account does not exist,” although anyone who deactivates an account on the site has the opportunity to restart it within 30 days, and most fans assume the mercurial singer will be back. Bryan may not be lying about actually liking Swift’s music, too, even if she did come up on the wrong end of the arrow in the Ye equation in his unsolicited comparison. He has posted in a more positive light about Swift in the past.
In late 2022, when her album “Midnights” was coming out, he tweeted, “miss swift what are the vibes at midnight good morning everybody and happy almost sweekend, get in we’re going crying.” When a fan asked his favorite Swift song, he said, “‘August,’ for sure.” Earlier in the week, Bryan stirred some controversy on X by suggesting a preference for artists not getting involved in making political stands, as Swift did when she endorsed Kamala Harris for president.
“Anyone willing to put politics above music don’t get the point of listening to music,” Bryan tweeted. Many users responded by posting shots of classic protest songs by Bob Dylan and others. Bryan’s possible artist of choice, West, has hardly been an apolitical figure, having frequently offered his support for Donald Trump and the MAGA movement before and after running for president himself.
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