Emotional moment: “Ice Spice Breaks Down in Tears After Discovering Taylor Swift’s Desire to Collab on ‘Karma'”

Ice Spice is opening up about her friendship with Taylor Swift, whom the rapper considers her “closest celebrity friend.”

In a cover story for Rolling Stone, Ice Spice recalled how she felt when her manager called her and said Swift wanted to collaborate with her on a remix to “Karma,” a song on her album Midnights. She shared that she was in her first apartment in New Jersey with her producer Riot, who was there recording her when her manager reached out

He usually texts, but he called, and he’s like, ‘You ready for this one?’ And I’m thinking it’s going to be some bad news or something,” the rapper recounted to the publication. “He’s like, ‘Taylor Swift has a record for you to get on from her album.’ I’m playing it cool on the phone. I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s cool. Super cool.’ And then I hang up the phone, and I’m hysterically crying. I’m in my walk-in closet, and I’m like, ‘Bro, this is not real life.’ Riot definitely filmed it. That’ll probably be in a documentary one day.”

When Ice Spice and Swift worked together on the bonus track, some people thought it was the “Fortnight” singer’s attempt at clout because the rapper had just started blowing up. “Which is so rude to me, [because] why would she not want to be my friend?” Ice Spice said. “Taylor fucks with me. She’s so funny. I think our personalities mesh really well

Shortly after Swift was romantically linked to The 1975 frontman Matty Healy in May 2023, the Grammy-winning artists’ friendship came further under the microscope when comments Healy made about the rapper resurfaced. He faced backlash on social media for a February 2023 interview on The Adam Friedland Show, during which the host brought up that she was a fan of the rock band but when on to make jokes about her, saying she sounded like an “Inuit Spice Girl” and a “chubby Chinese lady.”

While Healy didn’t make the comments himself, he laughed and engaged with the host as they mocked accents of people of Chinese and native descent. The musician reportedly apologized to Ice Spice during a concert stop in Auckland, New Zealand, a few months later but then later told The New Yorker the controversy “doesn’t actually matter.”

In her conversation with Rolling Stone, Ice Spice admitted she was late to the situation when it happened, saying that she “didn’t know about it until like a month after or something like that. He apologized multiple times, but I didn’t realize how big of a deal it was to other people. I feel like people just wanted something to be mad about, I guess. I wasn’t angry or sad or anything. I was just kind of confused. I never really cared about that.”