Taylor Swift (the Hayseed Barbie) has apparently been offered the role of Eponine in Tom Hooper’s new ‘Les Miserables’ film, which is clearly terrible news for those chumps amongst you who like overwrought musicals.

What’ll irritate the purists even more is that Swift has seemingly beaten off (no, not like that) actual actors including Lea Michele, Scarlett Johansson and Evan Rachel Wood.

Teenyboppers will be thrilling one off all over their Hello Kitty pen-tops while adults will be puking in their hands at the disgust of it all.

Talking to MTV, Molly Washok, 17 said:

“I seriously love ‘Les Miz.’ It’s a great Broadway musical. And I’ve seen Taylor Swift in shows and I love her so much. I’m a big fan of both, so it makes me excited.”

But can she act? She’ll be joined in Les Miserables by some big-hitting A-Listers like Hugh Jackman, Helena Bonham Carter, Russell Crowe and Anne Hathaway, and potentially, Amanda Seyfried.

So what landed Taylor the gig? Is it her likeness to Eponine?

Well, in Victor Hugo’s novel, Eponine grows up a spoiled brat who ends up in appalling poverty due to the bankruptcy of her parents’ inn. Eponine is described as a “pale, puny, meagre creature.” So far so good.

However, she’s also noted as having a hoarse voice like “a drunken galley slave’s” due to it being “roughened by brandy and by liquors.” Taylor Swift is about as sordid as Aled Jones. Eponine also has missing teeth and mangled hair, not to mention bony shoulders, heavy brooding drooping eyes, and a premature-aging face ‘with only a trace of beauty lingering’.

You can see why she got the part now, can’t you?

A film version of Les Miserables is afoot and everyone wants in because it really is exactly the kind of overwrought, bust-heaving weariness that gets you an Oscar nomination. And the thesps are circling like vultures!

Scarlett Johansson, Taylor Swift and Lea Michele (the main girl from Glee) are all competing with each other so they can land the coveted role in the upcoming Les Mis movie.

If any brake cables get cut in some terrible ‘accident’, you’ll know exactly who to blame. Right? There’s already a superstar cast signed up for this film too.

Tom Hooper’s big screen adaptation has a cast including Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway, Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter.

Helena Bonham Carter was always going to be on-board for this wasn’t she? We’re just waiting for Kenneth Branagh to get the nod and we’ll have a period-drama full-house!

However, all the rumours surround the lucky lass who will land the role of Eponine.

Apparently, Taylor Swift has already auditioned for the part. NO EXPERIENCE YOU SAY? You’ve obviously never seen the film Valentine’s Day! In that, Swift plays a one-legged smack-addict who enters the brutal world of snuff movies as she tries to raise money for her blind child’s lung operation.

Possibly.

Glee star Michele has also tried out, of course, having previous with Les Mis as she made her Broadway debut in the show in ’95.

Meanwhile, Scarlett Johansson wants us all to forget her boobies and take her seriously as an actress again JUST LIKE WE ALL USED TO TAKE HER REALLY SERIOUSLY, HONEST.

You’re about to read an article that does not feature a picture of Taylor Swift with her boobies out. Sure, there IS a picture of what APPEARS to be Taylor Swift with her boobies out, but you’re imagining it.

Got that?

So the leaked picture which is over the jump is totally a figment of your imagination AND Taylor Swift is suing people about this picture which she says isn’t her. But she’s suing all the same. Of course, the image is NSFW. And no is it Taylor Swift. Definitely not.

The girl in the photograph has a striking resemblance to the singer, don’t you think?

Close enough for Taylor Swift to sue for defamation of character? Swift has apparently instructed her lawyers to demand that the photo is taken down from the site and that she’ll sue CelebJihad for trademark infringement (the site breaking the story) if they don’t comply.

Even though the picture is NOT of Taylor Swift with her boobies out. Definitely not. Nope.

Okay?

Now, here’s the picture of a complete stranger that you’ve never heard of. Okay? Good. Right.

[photo via CelebJihad]

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Kanye West likes to remind us how ghetto he is whenever he can, because we shouldn’t be fooled by the rocks that he’s got, he’s still Kanye from the block.

But Kanye’s ghetto credentials may finally get revoked if rumours of his latest business venture are to be believed.

According to some magazine we’d never heard of until now, Kanye is to launch a new line of designer silk scarves. Which, as we all know, is the fashion accessory every wannabe gangbanger has been missing all this time.

How could we have not seen this before? Up until now every aspiring rapper that rises up from the street has looked a bit scruffy. They don’t quite have that Gentlemanly quality that would help them break into the mainstream.

After all, how threatened would your parents be by a rapper who wears a cravat? Not very. They’d even probably go to all the gigs with you and try and bop along whilst munching on cucumber sandwiches.

Just remind them not to go anywhere near the fish sticks.

Nowadays Kanye West is so far removed from reality it wouldn’t be surprising if he suddenly announced he’d invented unicorns and was personally responsible for Saddam being toppled.

His increasingly infuriating temper tantrums and bizarre entrepreneurial decisions fall somewhere on the crazy scale between Charlie Sheen’s meltdown and Mohamed Al-Fayed’s decision to build a slightly more lifelike likeness of his, “good friend,” Michael Jackson outside Fulham Football Club’s stadium.

We here at hecklerspray can only wonder at what other joyous concoctions Kanye will announce next, after the scarves fail to sell to anyone other than one of Primark’s elite team of increasingly expensive tat peddlers. He can’t be too far off releasing his own line of monocles, or possibly even a lovely collection of top hats.

All of which will naturally reflect his ghetto routes, by being obtusely neon and covered in bling. Because he’s from the streets is our Kanye.

And don’t you bloody forget it, or you’ll be whinged to death by a pompous, megalomaniacal Jay-Z clone who just wants you to respect him, despite never having done anything of any real worth.

Other than giving us some garish bloody scarves.

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Remember the first time you watched The Bodyguard? It felt like it was 37 hours long didn’t it? Still, nowhere near as long as the hideous ‘I Will Always Love YooooooOOOoOoOOOUuu’ haunted our pop charts.

As an aside, have you ever noticed that Whitney Houston looks like she’s having an alfresco dump as the key-change kicks in on the promo video for the song?

Anyway, Warner Bros are looking to remake the film about Whitney Houston being stalked by someone and then, ultimately, falling in love with one of the most boring faced humans on Earth, Kevin Costner. And sadly, it appears that they’re lining up Rihanna for the role.

Of course, putting Rihanna in a role where she’ll have to think she’s not interested in having some kinky S&M sex with someone is problematic. We’re under the assumption that Rihanna doesn’t really have any stalkers because she’s whisks them all backstage and rides them like stolen mopeds ’til they die.

And while the thought of RiRi being sullied by ballads and overwrought movie scripts, it isn’t nearly as depressing as the prospect of the other singers being associated with the film.

More likely to take on the role that Whitney Houston made so famous is Taylor Swift or Miley Cyrus. God help us.

It goes without saying that, thanks to this being an updated version, it’ll no doubt include a load of needless nods to the online world.

The stalker will probably use Twitter, Facebook and Google Maps in their attempts to have a quick wank on a washing line.

Deadline.com say

‘The goal is to take a young female singer with global appeal and give her the platform that The Bodyguard did Houston’

Sigh.

Meanwhile, away from the silver screen, Rihanna is being linked to just about every single human on the planet for sexy times. Man, woman and beast – no-one is safe from RiRi’s rampaging vagina it seems.

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Pot Noodle headed Taylor Swift and tree-faced Jake Gyllenhaal have, apparently, broken up. That didn’t last long did it? Clearly, this is a cheap ploy on behalf of Gyllenhaal to get free promotion from Swift as she writes all about it on her next insipidly twee album of soul-searching garbage.

Taylor Swift is clearly an unbearable human. Even Kanye West hates her and he’s one of the most preposterous dipsticks in human history.

Jake Hisnameistoolonganddifficulttospellwithoutcheckingtentimes is the latest on the list of men who seemingly can’t stand to be in the company of Taylor Swift.

In the past, Joe Jonas (one of the Jonas Clones) and Twilight brooder Taylor Lautner are other suffering men who probably once thought “She seems kinda nice” before, we can only assume, they either discovered some sick-making revelation about the country-pop singer or, y’know, realised that spending a lot of time with her would actually mean that they would have to listen to her music once in a while.

Jake GelatinousHall was first seen stepping out with Swift backstage at Saturday Night Live in October and went as far as spending a Thanksgiving weekend with her. However, it seems that they cheered in the New Year separately.

A source told People.com:

“They’re over – it ended last month.”

Their respective spokesidiots are currently not offering any sort of comment, which of course, gives everyone else the opportunity to make up stories about the whole thing and pass themselves off as ‘a friend’ or ‘a source’. That’s how we make our money.

Next week, every single writer for hecklerspray intends to get Taylor on the rebound so she can write a concept album about a snarky gossip blog which everyone hates.

Perez Hilton will be so insanely jealous that he might walk into a Black Eyed Pea fist all over again.

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Kanye West is a man with a rather high opinion of himself. Is that something of an understatement? In fact, don’t answer that because it clearly is. Kanye West is a man who sees himself as a renegade… a seeker of the real… a man with no fear.

Sadly, to anyone with even the vaguest trace of a braincell can see that he just needs a hug. For some time, West has been thrashing around, swatting away imagined threats. Sometimes, he’s bang on the money but, unfortunately for him, he most looks like someone trying to stab the night sky with a pitchfork.

And just when you thought he might settle down and just get on with being a musician again, he goes off on a 10 minute meltdown, wagging his finger at the world before sticking up his arse in some horrific mixture of self-abasement and foamy knuckled onanism.

Kanye took to the stage in a Not-Very-Secret-At-All New York show on Tuesday to celebrate the release of his new album ‘My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’.

All the while, at pains to point out that he is just someone trying to create something and that he’s not in ‘it’ to slate people or churn out numbers, he promptly went about not singing or rapping in favour of slating everyone else and churning out stats and figures about the sales of his new album.

This obsession with angry anecdotes and number crunching would of course make Kanye West an ideal person to guest on Countdown’s dictionary corner.

He found time to slag off Taylor Swift, again.

“Taylor never came to my defense in any interview! And she rode the wave and rode it and rode it!”

“When you do things like what happened last year, it’s disrespectful to everyone that’s creative! It’s a smack in the face to everyone who tries to do something real.”

“If I wasn’t drunk, I woulda been on stage longer!”

Get that? Make sense to you? If so, go seek medical attention immediately where white-coat wearers will attach electrodes to your failing brain.

“I ain’t here to talk in no stupid interviews, for some guy to ask me some stupid ass questions!”

But guess what he started to talk about?

“Matt Lauer’s not a bad guy, I’m sure. But if you are a child that’s being abused by your parent, or you are a girl being abused by your boyfriend – the greatest win that you could ever have is for that person to hit you in public. You SEE! YOU SEE! I TOLD YOU!”

He wasn’t there to talk about numbers either. Nope. According to Kanye, that’s not what he’s about. Oh. Wait. What’s this? He hasn’t finished talking yet.

“I always felt like I could do anything, but now I feel so fearless – after the year I had, to come back and do 100,000 on the first day, digital alone…to do 600,000 in the first week…and I don’t talk about the numbers. But what the numbers say is that the people want me to keep making music and never give up.”

Such is the thirst for Kanye’s music, you’d hope that, at some point, he might realise that they might prefer it if he spent 10 minutes of a gig (which is how long he enthusiastically dribbled on for) actually performing a track or two. Instead, what everyone was treated to was the world’s worst pastor, preaching self-aggrandising, wounded bollocks about himself.

It seems that, should West’s head vanish up his arse any further, gigs will soon be a 3 hour long speech about how hurt he is and how it won’t defeat him, finished off with one song. Then an encore of 2 hours where he points out how many sales he’s had with the help of a Powerpoint presentation.

Still, he’s got an answer for sneering shits like us.

“Everybody needs a villain, don’t we?”

Yep. And sometimes Kanye, they make it really fuckin’ easy for us too. Still need that hug you massive baby?

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Most people, when they turn 30, have a party or go to the pub. They might even go for a meal if they can bear the horrendous formalities of eating food in a restaurant. Not Jake Gyllenhaal. For his birthday, he’s going to swim with walruses.

You heard.

He’s going to do this seemingly pointless task in the Arctic Circle too. No, seriously. Goo goo g’joob.

The Donnie Darko actor (he’s been in other stuff, but no-one really cares do they?) will turn 30 years old on December 19th and will be joined by his family (who presumably hoped for a night down the pub/a party) for the sub-zero frolics in the in the Arctic Circle.

Jake said:

“The only reason I’m doing it is I wanted to do something that absolutely terrified me – killer whales and walruses and freezing cold water? That seems absolutely terrifying.”

Is it as terrifying as potentially being the muse for Taylor Swift’s next album? He’s rumoured to be dating her in case you missed that thrilling piece of news.

And poor ol’ Jakey was worried about leaving his 20s. Why? Christ knows. It’s only an age isn’t it? You don’t turn 30 and suddenly demand Horlicks over nights out. It seems that it was his sister, Maggie Gyllenhaal (who is 32) who told him to stop being so bloody stupid.

He added:

“I was talking to my sister the other day about being 30 and celebrating the life you’ve had up to this point. I feel there’s a massive sort of sea change coming in myself and I’m psyched.”

Sea change? A changing sea filled with walruses?

He added:

“I’m not 30 yet, but I definitely feel more like myself. I feel like now, it’s just the beginning. I guess you get to a point at 30 or somewhere and you say, ‘What I am, is what I am and that’s what I’m going to be and that’s all good.

“I don’t need to be anything else.’ And that’s kind of how I feel.”

Christ on a bike. Brace yourself for more horrible soul searching in public. He’ll be wanting stupid children next, carrying them around in one of those stupid papoose things.

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There’s a funny thing that sweeps through celebrities who open their mouths without kicking their brain gears into action first. Basically, what happens is, is that you say something stupid or controversial, everyone kicks you about a bit, and then you can emerge with those glorious words of “I’ve grown.”

Of course, famous people never ‘grow’. They’re in that suspended childhood reality of ‘celebrity’, which is great because it means we can continue to take the piss out of the stupid things they say and do.

And the latest are the odd-couple that is George W. Bush and Kanye West, who have both completely missed the opportunity to say something worthwhile in favour of reaching out their arms and demanding a cuddle from every single human on Earth.

As you probably know, Kanye angered Dubya by basically calling him a racist. George Dubya managed to forget the huge pile of cadavers that have come about as a result of That War, and decided instead, that the ill-thought out words of The Slowest Rapper In The World were the lowest point of his presidency.

Hmmm.

And so, to try and restore some balance, Kanye appeared on the Today show which left West even more wounded and needy for our affection.

“VERY BRUTAL”

That’s what our Kanye said on Twitter after filming the show. He added

“I feel very alone very used very tortured very forced very misunderstood very hollow very very misused.”

Bloody hell. So what caused all this then?

Well, after being asked to clarify his position, Kanye spluttered and squirmed like a martyr for fuck-all. It seems, the thing he doesn’t like is the formatting of television. It seems, Kanye West is a big cry-baby who doesn’t like it when people call him up on his lack-of-brains on television.

Annoyed, Kanye mewed:

“I didn’t need you guys to show me the tape in order to prompt my emotions or whatever.”

“I don’t need all the jazz…Can we be quiet for a second?”

Yeah, we should show reverence when someone has been asked to speak shouldn’t we. Like, say, WHEN SOMEONE IS ACCEPTING AN AWARD?

He noted

“I’m here to man up to different mistakes that I made, and speak to the moment when I pegged George Bush as a racist. I came here to say that I made mistakes and I’ve grown as a person.”

Then, showing just how much he’s grown…

“Yo, how am I supposed to talk if you’re going to run the thing in the middle while I’m talking?…Please don’t let that happen again. It’s ridiculous.”

So, if you haven’t seen the footage, here it is. Witness first hand just how an egotistical dunderhead reacts when he’s asked to act like a grown-up.

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In recent years, it seems that just about anyone can get their own range of perfume. Jade Goody even got one! It seems that you don’t have to be famous for a prolonged period or, indeed, a celebrity associated with fashion… you just get one simply by being.

Even the bloody Sex Pistols have a perfume out, which is quite frankly, preposterous! And now, on the back of fragrances from Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber and Kim Kardashian, Taylor Swift is now going to have a bottle of scented water launched with her name on it.

If you care even slightly, Taylor Swift will be making the perfume with Elizabeth Arden and it will be on the shelves in late 2011.

That’s right nostril owners!

On Monday, Elizabeth Arden announced the new Taylor Swift perfume and also revealed the signature Swift fragrance will be available in late 2011.

The Taylor Swift perfume doesn’t have a name or anything like that yet, but it is said that she’ll be involved in product development, packaging and marketing of the Swift perfume.

So what can we expect?

Well, it’s pretty obvious that it’ll be a twee affair. It’ll probably smell vaguely like flowers, grass and general outdoorsery, because Swift is like, y’know, a rural Earthy type.

The packaging will no doubt be all cutesy, pink and covered in butterflies and ribbons and be the most girlie thing ever released.

However, if it is to stay true to the personality of the singer, then it will have to be essentially a bottle of virtually unscented water that is somehow more boring that water itself.

Imagine a cup of lukewarm water left on a windowsill next to a scented candle and you’re aiming toward the right area for what this product will (should?) be like.

Unless of course, it is made from Taylor’s tears, spilled from her ducts when thinking about all those mind-crushingly dull boyfriends she’s had all these years.

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If rumours are to be believed, then Taylor Swift’s next album is going to be about Jake Gyllenhaal. That means, of course, her next album is going to be filled with boring love songs or boring break-up songs. The only thing that’s certain is that it will be more tedious than eating Rich Tea biscuits covered in cat litter.

Why doesn’t Taylor fall on the sword for her ‘art’ and go out with someone massively inappropriate like Randy Quaid or Dog The Bounty Hunter? That would ensure that her next album was a total hoot to listen to!

However, Taylor is insistent on dating people as dull as she is and apparently, she spend the weekend with Jake Gyllencan’tbebothertypinghisnameoutconstantly in New York city. They probably drank some coffee and sat silently in a park looking at ducks.

That’s not true actually. The date went like this.

She took him to a taping of Saturday Night Live (and by ‘taping’, you can assume that this meant going to see it being filmed, rather than the pair switched the TV but watched the digital numbers go ’round on her VHS recorder as it taped the show from the television – although that seems plausible) and when the lights dimmed, she told her bodyguard to sling his hook so that Gyllenhaal could sit next to her and nearly hold her hand.

A witness:

“They chatted a lot, but no kissing or hand holding or anything affectionate.”

If she’d dated Dog the Bounty Hunter, he would have sneakily got to second base and then leapt through the air to catch some criminal while shouting “Brah” at the end of every sentence.

Then, the coma-inducing duo spent the next day having brunch (the most boring of all meals) before taking a stroll in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood.

That’s where they probably silently stared at ducks.

And of course, Him From Donnie Darko will end up in a boring ditty:

Taylor says:

“Every person I’ve fallen for, they’ve all been a song. That kind of justifies [the exes] being in my life.”

God knows she didn’t pick up tips on how to give blow-jobs or anything vaguely interesting or salacious as that. If you date a Jonas brother, all you’re going to learn is how to constantly talk like you’re in a job interview.

Here’s hoping that Taylor Swift gets addicted to mind-bending drugs over the course of the next 12 months. Or a plane engine lands on her house. That’d be fun.

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Taylor Swift  – musical cress – has had a bumper 12 months or so, rising to baffling stardom with the twee-est, more Dawson Creeky music ever written and, of course, finding  time to get involved in the lamest beef ever with Kanye West.

And like all whining singer-songwriters, she’s rather fond of baring her soul through her songs, which usually equates to complaining about ex-lovers. We’ve yet to hear any singer-songwriter crooning about crying over a compilation tape that an ex made for them. Bad darts.

Anyway, Taylor is now single (presumably because no-one wants to become the subject of one of her insipid ditties) and she’s revealed that she’s loving it and not looking for a new boyfriend.

The singer and actress has dated Joe Jonas and Twilight star Taylor Lautner in the past, which puts an image of staggeringly dull sex in our filthy heads. You can imagine just about any of the mentioned people dry heaving and nearly fainting at the mere presence of an engorged member.

They’re all so toweringly feeble that any movement of blood to an extremity would probably see them crying with dizziness.

And so, Swift has noted that, while her relationships inspire her work, she’s not planning on jumping into a new one anytime soon.

She might be enjoying ‘the single life’ like the girls hecklerspray knows from the pub by jumping into beds with strangers. That, or she really likes being despairingly lonely.

There’s probably a sensible third option, but we can’t be bothered to acknowledge it properly because we’re gits like that.

Taylor said:

“Being single is wonderful and I love it. I don’t ever have a morning where I wake up and say, ‘I really need to find a boyfriend today.’”

That’s not stopping people linking Taylor romantically to yet another beige dullard… this time, John Mayer. And all this is probably going into the next album.

Taylor revealed:

“I will say everything in my music.”

“There’s been extreme joy, extreme pain, extreme curveballs. Sometimes when things impact you so intensely, it takes writing a song to get over them.”

That’s right.

Get all those raw emotions and then get the rolling pin out and painfully and slowly surpress them until they sound like every other bland MOR bollocks ever written.

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Kanye West is an astonishing human who should give us all something to be positive about. Basically, if Kanye is able to become gigantically successful, then any one of us could end up ruling the world.  How very aspirational/unfair the world is.

But we shouldn’t slag Kanye too much. Why? Because he’s a tender, thoughtful and gentile man who is feeling real, human pain over his ambush of Taylor Swift. His mini-meltdown is being recorded forever on his Twitter feed, just so we can all see him cry like a Tiny Tears doll.

The Famous Human let loose with a torrent of emotional dribblings over the weekend, acknowledging that he was wrong for grabbing the microphone from Taylor at the MTV Video Music Awards and saying her trophy should have gone to Beyonce.

Even though he was right.

Kanye said that he had experienced enormous pain, been the subject of death threats and suffered a tremendous setback to his career.

He tweeted:

“How deep is the scar … I bled hard … cancelled tour with the number one pop star in the world … closed the doors of my clothing office.”

He continued to clog up everyone’s twitter feed, saying:

“People tweeted that they wish I was dead … No listen. They wanted me to die people. I carry that. I smile and take pictures through that.”

And what now? He’s…

“ready to get out of my own way. The ego is overdone.”

It’s not all about Kanye and his pain though. No. This is all about Taylor. And he aimed words at her, saying that he’d written a song for her (with a mild threat):

“If she won’t take it then I will perform it for her.”

She’ll be thrilled won’t she? I bet she’s already learning how to talk people down from the ledge as we speak.

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Hey, you! Can’t wait to get your hands on Mine, the new single by pop-country sensation Taylor Swift?

You can’t? Then we’ve got some excellent news. You’re an idiot. That’s the news, essentially. You’re an idiot for liking Taylor Swift. Oh, and you haven’t got any friends. And your haircut is atrocious. And you probably smell like tinned meat. These are all things that we’ve deduced by the simple fact that you like Taylor Swift enough to be excited about anything she does.

Upsettingly, though, you’re not the only one. Apparently some people are such idiots that they like Taylor Swift enough to go to the effort of leaking Mine onto the internet. And, as a result, Taylor Swift has moved the song’s release date forward by 12 days. And that means it’s even harder to avoid than we would have liked. God, we hate Taylor Swift fans.

Let’s make a list. Let’s think of all the things we’d rather do than spend money on Taylor Swift’s new single Mine. We’d rather:

* Set fire to ourselves.

* Chew tinfoil.

* Dry-hump a ham slicer.

* Sandblast our eyeballs.

* Provoke a disgruntled rhinoceros with a compromising photograph of its wife.

And, because you’re sensible people, you probably feel the same. But some fools are dying to get their hands on Taylor Swift’s new single, even though there’s a very good chance that it sounds exactly the same as all the other anaemic, mechanically-reclaimed country whine-pop she’s ever released. They’re so desperate to hear it that they’ve pounced upon a leaked download of the track with such ferocity that Taylor’s record label has had to rush-release an official version. ABC News reports:

Country-pop starlet Taylor Swift’s record label has been forced to release the first single from her upcoming album 12 days ahead of schedule after a bootleg version appeared online. Big Machine Records said in a statement the MP3 file of Mine was “low quality” and it wants Swift’s fans to hear the single in its proper form.

Thank God that Big Machine Records has the public’s best interests at heart. Its executives only brought the single’s release forward because the leaked MP3 was low quality, and not because they all want to wring every single last penny they can out of Taylor Swift while she’s still a viable market commodity. They’re all heart, those people. All heart.

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The Grammys, then. Beyonce won the most awards, and Michael Jackson got Celine Dion to caterwaul in front of a 3D dandelion.

But the Grammys belonged to Taylor Swift. In total Taylor won awards for Album Of The Year, Best Country Album, Best Country Female and Best Country Song, and Kanye West wasn’t around to babble like a giant twit through any of her acceptance speeches. The Grammys were Taylor Swift’s moment to shine – at least, right up until the moment she started to sing, at which point they became Taylor Swift’s moment to make a bizarre noise like a burning donkey sanctuary.

And that’s apparently big news. So big, in fact, that her label manager has stepped up to tell everyone to jolly well stop being so mean about her. Fun.

The Grammys has many things to be proud of. It can be proud of the fact that it’s currently the music awards show that goes on for the longest amount of time – Sunday’s ceremony clocked in at an impressive three full days – and it can be proud of the fact that it’s the only awards show where everybody wins something, regardless of whether they want to or not.

But there’s one thing that the Grammys, in all good conscience, can’t be proud of. The duets. Every year it’s the same – for some reason the Grammy organisers decide to pair up the most horrifically mismatched artists possible, usually involving Steven Tyler and Joss Stone, and force them to sing a song that neither of them are suited to. It’s awful. And this year the winners of the Most Cack-Handed Grammys Duet were Taylor Swift and Stevie Nicks.

Unfortunately, copyright restrictions mean that we can’t show you the video of Taylor Swift and Stevie Nicks singing Rihannon together, so here’s the next best thing. Imagine that Rihannon is playing on the radio. Now imagine that your nan, after sustaining a heavy blow to the side of her head, is attempting to sing along to it. Now imagine that she’s doing this even though she’s never heard Rihannon before in her life. Now imagine that she’s also being attacked by a pack of feral dogs. Now imagine that she’s also on fire. That’s roughly what Taylor Swift sounded like at the Grammys.

But just because her performance sounded like a set of nails grinding down a blackboard in an echo tunnel filled with distressed babies, it doesn’t mean that you can be rude about Taylor Swift. It doesn’t. The boss of her record label, Scott Borchetta, said so and everything.  The Tennessean quotes:

“Maybe she’s not the best technical singer, but she’s probably the best emotional singer. Everybody is not perfect on any given day. Maybe in that moment we didn’t have the best night. But in the same breath, maybe we did. This is what always happens. Well, you better have more than what you’ve got now if you think you’re going to get in the ring and fight with us. So, get in the ring.”

So, just to sum up Borchetta’s quote:

1 - Taylor Swift was brilliant.

2 - Taylor Swift was also rubbish.

3 - In addition, people who don’t like Taylor Swift might be allowed to physically fight her soon, even though that seems like quite an unethical thing to do.

Thanks Scott. Much clearer now. You’re a star.

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