Three songs have been playing every night before Taylor Swift has taken the stage on her current tour, and each one seems to convey a different message. One track is Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me,” a classic assertion of female independence. Another is Lady Gaga’s “Applause,” a pump-up jam in which a celebrity confesses her hunger for approval. Then there’s Ice Spice’s “In Ha Mood,” a recent hip-hop song whose presence shows, among other things, that Swift is paying attention to what’s hot in pop culture—an important fact to keep in mind when evaluating the controversy now brewing around her.

Ice Spice is a 23-year-old Bronx emcee whose whispery voice and puff of red hair have become internationally famous in a very short span of time, following the TikTok success of her August 2022 single “Munch (Feelin’ U).” She features on the new remix of Swift’s track “Karma,” released last week, and this past weekend she joined Swift to perform the song at the singer’s three concerts in New Jersey. From a distance, the story feels familiar: Established star allies with rising star for mutual benefit. But the remix has unleashed a wave of indignation online, making Swift, not for the first time, a focal point for conflicting attitudes about what entertainers owe their audience. Right now, the allegation that keeps coming up is that Ice Spice is being used as a “prop”—though she’s probably better thought of as a protagonist.

Understanding the outrage requires delving into the fraught subject of Swift’s dating life. Earlier this year, Swift broke up with her boyfriend of six years, the actor Joe Alwyn. According to media reports that haven’t been officially confirmed by any of the parties involved, she then began seeing Matty Healy, the singer from the rock band The 1975. Healy is a self-styled prankster whose lyrics satirize sex and society. Over the years, he has offended various constituencies, most recently by guesting on a podcast in which the hosts made extremely racist jokes about Ice Spice. Healy later publicly apologized to Ice Spice, but in a New Yorker profile, he remarked that the backlash “doesn’t actually matter.” He also said, “We used to expect our artists to be cigarette-smoking bohemian outsiders, and now we expect them to be liberal academics.”

That Swift might have to answer for Healy’s deeds is not, from a distance, obvious. Adults in relationships do not always agree on everything, and they are rarely called to explain to outsiders how they navigate disagreement. But Healy’s association with Swift, who has publicly spoken out for racial justice in recent years, has troubled many of her listeners. One tweet with 15,000 likes lamented that Swift has provided “no accountability, no apology for those that were harmed with her decision making.” When reading such sentiments, it is hard to distinguish idealism—the notion that a star should use her platform to do good—from the shaky belief that a famous person is in a real, give-and-take relationship with millions of fans she has never met.

Swift has, of course, built an empire out of parasocial fervor: Her songs conjure a feeling of intimacy between consumer and creator. Though she often refrains from making explicit public statements about her personal life—her relationship with Alwyn was pointedly private—much of her work does send coded messages. So when she announced that she would be releasing a track with Ice Spice, a takeaway seemed obvious: Swift was addressing the Healy blowback with evidence that she and Ice Spice were copacetic. To some observers, that subtext had another subtext, informed by the exploitative history of white performers using Black artistry to shore up their credibility.

[Read: Taylor Swift and the sad dads]

The funny thing about that line of thinking, in this case, is that it is so deeply entranced by Swift’s public-relations concerns, it minimizes Ice Spice’s agency. After less than a year in the public eye, Ice Spice could soon have her third top-10 Hot 100 hit thanks to “Karma (Remix).” Her other smashes have also been collaborations, with the rap legend Nicki Minaj and the bedroom-pop newcomer PinkPantheress. Most of Ice Spice’s songs are about the willfulness that has driven this rapid rise. Take these lines from “In Ha Mood”: “Pretty bitch, but I came from the gutter / Said I’d be lit by the end of the summer / And I’m proud that I’m still gettin’ bigger / Goin’ viral is gettin’ ’em sicker.”

The Swift remix is further proof of that ambition. As Swift told the roaring crowd at her concert this past Friday, Ice Spice was the one who reached out to work with her. That was early in 2023—at a time when Swift was listening to Ice Spice’s music constantly while prepping for the tour. So though Swift may well have timed the release of this remix for purposes of damage control, she also, quite plausibly, was planning on working with the rapper anyway. Whatever Ice Spice may feel about the situation, she did gleefully celebrate the collaboration on Instagram and join Swift for three nights in a row.

As music, does their pairing work? The “Karma” remix isn’t all that memorable, but it does feature an intriguing blend of attitudes and styles. Ice Spice’s trademarks are certainly apparent: a rasping, casual vocal tone; a host of methodically delivered, unfussy punch lines. She simultaneously conveys that she believes in herself and that she’s not trying too hard. This sense of ease, verging on apathy, contrasts with the gushing emotion and anxious assertiveness of Swift, an admitted try-hard.

In that way, Ice Spice’s unbothered air is a fitting accompaniment to the controversy: Fans are now having to reckon with the fact that Swift, who has for so long seemed to care about every possible connotation of her every move, is pursuing desires that don’t always neatly line up with her brand. Whether or not Ice Spice minds being part of the drama, she’s likely focused on her next move. As she raps on another song, “I’m still gettin’ money / I know who I am.”

When the singer noticed security removing a fan during her concert, Swift came to the fan's defence.

In an era when pop stars market themselves as one-of-a-kind superheroes, Ed Sheeran writes humble, catchy songs that don’t really call attention to who made them. He sings with the relatable raspiness of someone you might encounter in a pub; his lyrics celebrate normie romance, the kind that blooms outside a castle on a hill, rather than inside of one. His album titles—+, x, ÷, =, and now - (call it Subtract)—even suggest computation rather than art. Now that artificial intelligence can imitate Taylor Swift’s voice and Drake’s cadences, it raises the question: Couldn’t software that was trained on his voice replace him?

Obsolesce has been on Sheeran’s mind lately. In 2017, the heirs of the co-writer of Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” filed a lawsuit claiming that Sheeran’s 2014 hit “Thinking Out Loud” copied the 1973 soul classic. Though a jury on Thursday ruled in Sheeran’s favor, the case—the latest in a string of plagiarism controversies for him over the years—clearly shook him: He said that if he lost in court, he’d simply quit making music. Most pop songwriting involves recycling and reinterpreting, but because Sheeran forgoes personality and spectacle, his influences have nowhere to hide in his music. Other stars’ hits have the subtle quality of feeling like they’ve always existed; Sheeran’s are overt about channeling familiar elements—be it an Elvis inflection or Bronski Beat riff—into a new sing-along. The copyright claims against him thus have felt like an existential attack, threatening to render invalid the very abilities that have made him successful for more than a decade.

Sheeran’s melancholy new album shows what happens when a man on a hot streak confronts the possibility of the end. In 2022, he faced not only legal troubles but also the death of a close friend (the music entrepreneur Jamal Edwards) and a cancer diagnosis for his wife, Cherry, who underwent “successful” surgery last June. A Disney+ documentary series accompanying the album depicts these developments as upending both Sheeran’s mental health and artistic outlook. In the series, he speaks nervously of an inevitable career “plateau,” and of recommitting to the idea of writing songs to please himself rather than the masses. But in sharing these anxieties, he’s also plainly trying to extend his appeal. “He wants to say to people, ‘I’m not just this music machine,’” Cherry says in the documentary. “‘I’m not just this robot that tries to get No. 1s.’ Like, ‘I’m a father, I’m a son, I’m a friend, I’m a husband.’”

To re-center himself as a person, he has re-centered himself as an acoustic balladeer, moving away from the rap-inflected radio bait of his previous few albums. But he’s gone classic in a decidedly modern way by working with Aaron Dessner, the multi-instrumentalist from The National who helped reboot Swift’s sound in 2020. Unlike other auteur producers like Jack Antonoff or Ariel Rechtshaid, Dessner is more of a collage artist than a pop wizard. His arrangements—which employ eerie strings, meditative guitars, and pitter-pattering percussion—work best as elegant frames for interesting songwriting. He has made Sheeran’s new album sound cold and wet, befitting lyrics about battling despair on the wintry English coast.

This approach sometimes pays off, conveying all-too-convincing fears and joys. The rumbling, hymn-like “Salt Water” conjures a stark sense of suspense—and eventual relief—as Sheeran shares a surprisingly vivid dream of suicide (“Now I’m standing on the edge, gazing into hell / Or is it somethin’ else?”). On the opposite side of the emotional spectrum, “Dusty” blossoms from easygoing reggae-pop into ecstatic rock that captures the highs of early fatherhood. The Bon Iver–ish yowling of “Spark” and raggedly poignant chorus of “End of Youth” demonstrate that even when Sheeran’s mood is dampened, his ear for catchy hooks remains sharp.

[Read: The puzzling ubiquity of Ed Sheeran]

Yet Sheeran’s emotional excavation digs only so deep. The strong, concrete images (“the blackbirds, they fly / like a frown on the skyline”) are outnumbered by garbled, and often water-related, clichés (“I suppose I’ll sink like a stone / If you leave me now, oh, the storms will roll”). He sings of unresolvable sadness, yet all too eagerly circles back to self-help bromides (“Tears dry and will leave no trace and tomorrow’s another day”). The album won’t help him beat the copycat reputation, either. Particularly jarring are lyrics (“If we make it through this year / Then nothin’ can break us,” in “No Strings”) and arrangements (the strummy bonus track “Toughest”) that ape The Mountain Goats’ The Sunset Tree—exactly the kind of brutal, personal, and wearily uplifting album that Sheeran seems to want to write. When Swift sought to enter a new chapter, she worked with Dessner to unlock a vibrant and uncompromising—yet still catchy—mode of storytelling. Sheeran hasn’t quite gotten there.

For most of the listening public, of course, blandness has never been an impediment to enjoying Sheeran’s music. Just as some of his old songs will forever be played at weddings, some of these new ones might well become memorial-service staples. But this time, he seems interested in more than immortality in the marketplace: “The album that I’ve made is about being honest,” he told the Australian radio DJ Zane Lowe in an interview. “I hope people just see me as a human being, and not a statistic-crazed pop monster.” The flaws of Subtract, in a way, serve that goal—anxiety and loss and similes about the ocean are generic to the human experience. But alas, if you’d told a neural network trained on Sheeran’s past work to make an album about grief, it might sound like this.