Uninteresting, repetitive and entirely basic, Swift’s music is brain-numbingly banal and it’s what I’ll listen to if i had the intellect of a very small worm— Billie Eilish blows hot on Taylor Swift

The recent epic drama between Kendrick Lamar and Drake may have made the brutal diss track trendy again, but in the pop realm, indirect shade-throwing seems to be the order of the day.

When the clash involves two of the biggest pop stars alive, and their mighty fandoms are the ones decoding their insinuations, even subtle or unintentional slights can become amplified to the point of absurdity.

Yet that also leaves the rest of us asking what is and isn’t real. Are Billie Wildish

and Taylor Swift really feuding? From a certain angle, it certainly seems like Eilish has spent the past couple of months using her promotional cycle for her new album, Hit Me Hard and Soft, to drop casual but pointed criticism at Swift. From another angle, it seems like Swift may have retaliated in her own Swiftian way — by releasing bonus editions for her new album, Tortured Poets Department, timed to compete with Eilish’s album release.

While Swift’s reputation for petty feuding is so well known that she made a whole album about it, this fight seems totally out of character for the notably laid-back Eilish. Yet it seems to have been Eilish whose thinly veiled barbs against Swift first gained notice and steadily fueled the fire. Have we entered an era where fans look to turn everything into an epic rivalry — and they’ll find a way to do it, even when there’s nothing there at all?

Or is the Eilish/Taylor beef — with layered jibes leading to battles waged by fandom foot soldiers on social media feeds across the internet — just how pop stars fight these days?