Bad Blood: The Taylor Swift power posse storms London
On Sunday night, as Daniel Craig zipped up the Thames as James Bond, he probably felt invincible. But by yesterday morning the only London skyline anyone was talking about was the cameo the Gherkin and its environs made in Taylor Swift’s video for her new single Bad Blood.
Screened on Sunday evening at the Billboard Music Awards in Las Vegas, where Swift won eight awards, it’s the biggest event in pop since the last thing Taylor Swift did. It features Swift as Catastrophe, an assassin who is betrayed by former partner-in-crime Arsyn, played by Selena Gomez. It stars a selection of Swift’s pals, including Karlie Kloss and Cara Delevingne as fellow members of a kick-ass girl gang, in cahoots with rapper Kendrick Lamar. Other roles include a cigar-smoking Lena Dunham, den mother Cindy Crawford, a bazooka-toting Ellie Goulding, and virginal sci-bot Hailee Steinfeld.
The song is rumoured to be based on Swift’s feud with Katy Perry (the latter allegedly poached several of Swift’s backing dancers) and Gomez is wearing a wig similar to Perry’s raven bob. But more than that the Bad Blood video is soaked in Sin City stylisation and populated by a power posse. And quite a power posse at that.
Taylor Swift: Bad Blood video
It cements Taylor’s position in a galaxy of collaborative, tech-savvy influencers — partners in work and play. Dunham listens to Swift while writing Girls; Goulding supported her on tour; Tay played the Victoria’s Secret show in which Kloss was modelling and has sung with Cara at the US Ambassador’s home in London. They all pop up on each other’s Instagram accounts; together their social media following is in the very high millions. The girls in the power posse supported each other, tweeting links to the vid on Monday morning and trailing their bespoke posters on Instagram last week.
Like it or not — naturally there are plenty in both camps — it’s a cultural water-cooler moment, cranking up almost 1.9 million views on YouTube. One colleague likened it to the Spice Girls Say You’ll Be There (girl gang against the world — everyone will remember where they were when they first watched it (don’t sneer — it’s true).
Swift is the slender but steely architect of her own image; she is unrelenting in her pursuit of those who seek to profit from it, which means telling her story her way. She produced the video and it was directed by Joseph Kahn, who also created Blank Space, Britney’s Toxic (arguably the most iconic video of the noughties), and Perry’s technicolour Waking Up in Vegas (ha).
Swift can’t change a whole industry permanently but she’s certainly its biggest — not to mention most stylish —story. Sorry, Bond.
