How pop culture’s obsession with ‘receipts’ led to 2018’s weirdest beef
Unless you’ve been orbiting the Earth on a SpaceX shuttle, or maybe living under a Tesla car, you’ll probably know that rapper Azealia Banks and professional billionaire man-child Elon Musk have been embroiled in one of 2018’s oddest feuds. After a bizarre trip to Musk’s house, which the singer described as “a real life episode of Get Out” (Musk, meanwhile, claimed he hadn’t so much as spoken to Banks), she began uploading scandalous screenshots of what she alleged were private conversations with his girlfriend, fellow musician Grimes, to her Instagram story. She had, to use a phrase from the glossary of new social media-related terminology, the “receipts”, and was unafraid to use them.
Instagram story from Azealia Banks. Photograph: Instagram/azealiabanks
The term “receipts”, in this context at least, originated from a 2002 tell-all interview with Whitney Houston. When Diane Sawyer asked the singer to verify reports that she had an expensive drug habit, she laughed and responded: “No way, no way. I wanna see the receipts. From the drug dealer that I bought $730,000 worth of drugs from. I wanna see the receipts.” Her retort was eventually immortalised in gif form and the rest is pop culture history.
The term was then adopted by the LGBT+ community and, in particular, drag queens, eventually being mainstreamed thanks to the success of RuPaul’s Drag Race. The concept of “keeping receipts” has also become a staple of reality TV shows such as Real Housewives, with cast members reaching for texts or emails to confirm events that happened off-camera. In 2017, Katy Perry jumped on the bandwagon with Swish Swish, a lukewarm revenge-themed track about how karma “keeps receipts”. The song is allegedly about Perry’s former nemesis Taylor Swift, whose – wait for it – reputation was dented when Kim Kardashian released some scandalous “receipts” of her own. After Swift objected to lyrics in Kanye West’s song Famous, Kardashian released audio that appeared to show Swift personally approving her husband’s lyrics. Politics aside, it was the biggest drama of 2016.
When carefully crafted PR statements and dead-eyed sponsored posts for detox tea are the norm, it’s easy to forget that behind the facade the world’s most famous musicians are navigating their petty dramas using the same messaging apps as us mortals. Via an endless stream of screenshots, they can also control the narrative arc of a news story and give the impression of full transparency while still being selective over what they show us. In Banks’s case, it’s also a way of keeping people talking in between mixtapes.
For now, Banks’s feud with Musk appears to be over. The rapper even sent the business mogul a heartfelt apology letter. How do we know this? Because she posted a screengrab of it on Instagram, obviously.