Taylor Swift dropped the highly-hyped video for "Look What You Made Me Do" at the 2017 VMAs and it is...a lot. I'm still gathering myself. The singer's long-awaited return to the industry features a zombie Taylor, a pop star Taylor, and pretty much every other Taylor you can think of — including a bunch of old favorites that you'll recognize from her past music videos.
Don't get too attached, though. The theme of the video, like the song it was made for, is about how we can kiss those Taylors goodbye. The video even starts in a cemetery, with the headstone for her reputation sitting front and center.
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The rest of the video appears to be a battle between all the roles she's played throughout her career, and several nods to iconic pop culture moments or themes that we've long associated with the singer. There are, of course, snakes, but going back further, her dancers wear shirts emblazoned with "I <3 TS," a throwback to that iconic photo of Tom Hiddleston. There's also a particularly interesting scene where a dominatrix-esque T-Swift stands in front of a room of shiny, plastic women (picture that room in Westworld, but for models) a direct reference to the way she's been accused of curating an air-tight squad of women to follow her wherever she goes.
My personal favorite part of the video, however, occurs when the song is over. At the very end, that handful of the music video characters from earlier gather in a line and directly address some of the events that have unfolded in the past year — she even says out loud the iconic "I'd like to be excluded from this narrative" line that was made famous on her Instagram.
So much is happening and I need to watch it at least five more times before I can be at peace. Check it out below:
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