You’d have to live under a rock by now to not have heard that Taylor Swift is single and loving it. Despite her much-documented dating life, she has more recently shifted her focus from finding love to focusing on her music.
Swift was not only sick of seeing the media scrutinize every time she tried to go out to dinner with a guy, but she was more frustrated with the effect it had on the way people viewed her music. In response to a question she was asked in an interview last year about whether or not she was “boy crazy” Swift responded, “For a female to write about her feelings, and then be portrayed as some clingy, insane, desperate girlfriend in need of making you marry her and have kids with her, I think that’s taking something that potentially should be celebrated – a woman writing about her feelings in a confessional way – that’s taking it and turning it and twisting it into something that is frankly a little sexist.”
The solution? She stopped dating entirely and focused solely on her work. In her latest music video, she parodies the boy-crazy girl the media had made her out to be, and channeled this person in to what has been called her best work yet. The music video for “Blank Space” shows Swift and the gorgeous male model that plays her boyfriend riding bikes throughout her mansion, walking their dogs through the gardens of her mansion, and carving their names into a tree. All this romantic bliss ends, though, when Swift catches her boyfriend texting another girl. She then proceeds to scream at him, cry with mascara running down her face, throw a plant, and cut his shirt to shreds, and smash his fancy car with a golf club, before he manages to escape, and another equally beautiful man shows up in his place, and the cycle starts again.
While it is funny to laugh at the way she tries to smash the car or the fact that the way she coos “insane” at 2:27 will send chills down your spine, the video also achieves exactly what it needs to. By mocking her own image, Swift not only gets the last laugh at the people bothering to over-analyze her dating life, but she even cashes out on it: this video has been talked about, parodied, and even made into a horror movie trailer since its release.
Besides being wickedly entertaining, Swift’s parody of herself can also serve as nothing short of a good example of the power of being unafraid to take your critics head-on: by taking the very thing she felt was undermining her creative output, and turned it into a smart and wildly entertaining music video. The video parodies the character she has been pigeonholed into, and in doing so, Swift regains the power the media threatened to take from her by only focusing on her dating life. The reality is, the success of Swift’s career is unparalleled by any other artist in music right now, and she doesn’t seem willing to let that change any time soon.
Perhaps the best part of this, though is the simplicity with which she does it: within five minutes of a music video, all the ridiculousness in the fairy-tale-gone-wrong storyline ultimately sends a clear message clear: say what you want, but Taylor Swift is going to get the last laugh.