14 DAY TRIAL // Taylor Swift released a brand new video the other day, as part of a surprise announcement for her upcoming pop album, “1989.” “Shake It Off” is the leading single, and the video for it features the former country crooner trying her hand at a series of dance styles, including twerking.
You can see the video in full below.
The idea for it is clear: Taylor is the same adorkable girl we know from previous releases, but now with a heftier dose of awkward dancing. So, she dresses up as a B-boy, she is a ballerina, a dancer at a contemporary dance studio and, last but not least, a video vixen that’s required to twerk but is, oh, so adorably unable to do it.
At first sight, the video is pure Taylor-style material, where she’s trying to push this image of her as a young woman who is still childish and innocent enough – but also very cool! – as to be able to have a laugh at her own expense or at what people have to say about it.
Take a closer look, voices online are saying. Twitter is being flooded with angry comments from people, some of them fans of Taylor’s previous work, who couldn’t help but notice how “Shake It Off” pretends to use irony to mock certain stereotypes but ends up relying on them and thus enforcing them.
The ballerinas are all white, but the girls who twerk in the background are black. Taylor is using cultural appropriation just like Katy Perry and Lily Allen did before her in order to pass as “hip” and “cool” but, in doing so, she’s being racist.
For the record, Perry and Allen too were severely criticized for their choices in videos like “Unconditionally” and “Hard Out Here.” In the former, Katy was dressed up as a geisha, while Allen was also shown trying to twerk with a troupe of all-black backup dancers in “Hard Out Here.”
Then, people also seem to take offense with the fact that Taylor chose this week out of all to release such a video that promotes racial stereotypes, when the US is again torn by racial tensions stemming from the fatal shooting of a black unarmed teenager by a white police officer.
Granted, she couldn’t have known what would happen in Ferguson but, when she did find out, she should have delayed the release of the video for a while.
However, the biggest complaint against Taylor and her new release seems to be that she’s racist and she’s offensive for perpetuating racial stereotypes, as Odd Future’s rapper Earl Sweatshirt puts it.
Check out the video and let us know what you make of it: is Taylor being offensive and racist, or are people reading too much in what is, after all, a silly and shallow pop song & video?
haven't watched the taylor swift video and I don't need to watch it to tell you that it's inherently offensive and ultimately harmful
— EARL (@earlxsweat) August 19, 2014
perpetuating black stereotypes to the same demographic of white girls who hide their prejudice by proclaiming their love of the culture
— EARL (@earlxsweat) August 19, 2014
