On Wednesday afternoon, one day after rapper Nicki Minaj and white rapper Taylor Swift became embroiled in an extremely heated Twitter exchange about race and about nothing, area woman Katy Perry tweeted this:

Katy Perry is exactly as literate, clever, and judicious as her chosen profession requires her to be, but no more than that—three factors which combine to make her statement extremely difficult to comprehend.

A clearer version of the tweet might have read:
I find it ironic that Taylor Swift is raising the How Dare You Pit Women Against Other Women argument while she herself is directly profiting from the takedown of a woman.

A little easier to diagram, perhaps, but still too coy to be entirely lucid.

Here’s all the background knowledge a person must possess in order to understand that tweet:

1. Taylor Swift hates Katy Perry.

2. Taylor Swift’s popular single “Bad Blood” is widely understood to be a knock at Katy Perry, though she and Perry have never explicitly addressed this fact. (From Rolling Stone: “The angriest song on 1989 is called ‘Bad Blood,’ and it’s about another female artist Swift declines to name.”)

3. Taylor Swift received an MTV Video Music Award nomination for Best Video for the “Bad Blood” video, the cast of which pointedly includes every white woman in America except Katy Perry. (It was this nomination that prompted the tussle with Nicki Minaj.)

4. Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, and Nicki Minaj are all popular musical entertainers, Twitter is an online social messaging service that allows users to broadcast 140-character written “tweets” to the world, MTV is a basic cable channel created in the 1980s to promote music videos and sell products to young people, etc.

5. Katy Perry hates Taylor Swift.

By releasing a single all about her aggressively antagonistic relationship with Katy Perry; by releasing a video in which a team of girlfriends helps her prepare to physically destroy a proxy for Katy Perry (played by Selena Gomez); by picking a fight with Nicki Minaj about the sanctity of female solidarity—a fight brought on by her award nomination for a video for a song about how Katy Perry is a bad friend—Taylor Swift is being hypocritical.

Argues Katy Perry.

And now you understand the tweet.

[Images via Getty]