Taylor Swift’s music video for “Bad Blood” is finally here! All week long, she has been tweeting out posters of the video’s stars, and because there were so many people in the video, I couldn’t help but thinking “this is either going to be awesome or awful.” And I think it’s beyond awesome.
What’s great about the video is that it perfectly chronicles the narrative Swift gave us about the inspiration about the song. She said that it was about how a fellow female musician who she once thought of as a friend tried to sabotage her Red Tour by buying out her crew and performers. In the video we see Selena Gomez as “Arsyn” fighting with Taylor Swift as “Catastrophe.” They seem to be fighting together to save the world, and then Gomez goes in and sabotages the mission by defenestrating Swift. Then Swift is rebuilt and trained by her strong female friends (another parallel to Swift’s life, as she has said in multiple interviews that she spent the year leading up to 1989 befriending and spending time with “inspiring” and “powerful” women). And then they stand together to take down the enemy. Even if you don’t care about the match up between the video and Swift’s narrative, I still think it’s empowering message of people coming together and supporting/training one another.
This video is perhaps one of Swift’s best (although, I thoroughly enjoyed the one for “Shake it Off”), and I like that it’s so epic and badass. I also think it’s kind of funny/cool that Selena Gomez was the villain. The other “cool” thing about this video is that it features Kendrick Lamar. I’ve always kind of hoped that one day T. Swift would put out a song that featured a rapper, so now that kind of happened.
