How Taylor Swift's Blank Space Video Redefines Music and Our Culture
1 Taylor redefines the role of the horse in music
Twelve seconds into the video for Blank Space, a black-clad Taylor sits on her bed, clutching a white cat. Flanking the bed are two white horses. Previously horses have had been best known in music for their metaphorical role – the Wild Horses that couldn’t drag Mick Jagger away – or as slang term for heroin, for decades the drug of choice for people who admire the makers of Wild Horses too much. By placing the horses so centrally, so early in the video, Taylor sends out a stark and unignorable message about equine rights. And, almost certainly, makes reference to the death of Emily Davison, the suffragette trampled to death by the king’s horse at the 1913 Derby. This is groundbreaking stuff. Later on, there’s a deer in the house. To be honest, that’s probably just the result of leaving the doors open.
Paradigm-smashing rating: 8
2 Taylor rides a bicycle indoors
The average arena or stadium tour creates more CO2 in three gigs than the entire Chinese coal industry does in a decade. That’s scientific fact [subs: please check]. By riding a bicycle indoors, after 38 seconds, Taylor sends out a stark and unignorable message about the need to move away the internal combustion engine, and possibly start using pedal power to generate electricity for homes, even mansions (especially mansions) if humanity is to survive. But what’s even more clever is that this comes just seconds after she’s featured a vintage sports car, driven by the man who’s clearly feckless and no good. By showing that car, Taylor sends out a stark and unignorable message that car usage and fecklessness are linked. And that cycling is a feminist issue.
Paradigm-smashing rating: 7
3 Taylor has a picnic consisting entirely of champagne and sweets
Whereas every other video featuring anyone ever will only show its stars eating macrobiotic Nicaraguan tofu, creating a climate of body fascism, Taylor chooses to be pictured eating sweets and drinking alcohol. In so doing, she sends out a stark and unignorable message that we and we alone control our bodies, and that we and we alone are the only people our body shapes need to please. This is made even more stark and unignorable by the fact that the video stars two slim and attractive people. Slim and attractive on the outside, perhaps, but isn’t the real message that they might be ugly on the inside. Think about it, yeah?
Paradigm-smashing rating: 5
4 The bloke keeps using his phone
He does it while he’s having a picnic with Taylor. He does it when he’s in the garden with her. Taylor doesn’t look happy about it. That’s obviously because she’s sending a stark and unignorable message to Spotify that streaming is killing songwriters’ careers and she will have no part of it. The fact that it is a man fiddling with the phone is clearly a statement that the music industry is controlled by men, and only when a revolutionary coalition spanning sexes, genders, races and ages unites can we possibly develop a new music industry that nurtures creativity without exploiting listeners: that revolution is symbolised by Taylor dropping the phone into water. In many ways, that phone-drop is the most revolutionary moment in music since the invention of recorded sound. Its echoes will reverberate from here to the last syllable of recorded time.
Paradigm-smashing rating: 10
5 Taylor cuts the nipples out of the bloke’s shirt
In a very real sense, Taylor is sending a stark and unignorable message that she will not stand for the objectification of women in pop music a minute longer. So, record company executive, you think women are no more than a pair of breasts? Well, see how you like it when you are reduced to being nothing more than a pair of breasts. Alternatively, she is sending a stark and unignorable message that the boyfriend in this video is so stupid he puts on the shirt even though it is clearly missing both nipples. Which itself is almost certainly a metaphor for cuts to public services in an age of austerity: for what is healthcare in both the US and the UK but a nippleless shirt?
Paradigm-smashing rating: 8
6 Taylor hits the sports car with a golf club
This works on so many levels and sends out so many stark and unignorable messages, that this single scene should be considered a work of art in its own right, as well as one of the most profound statements of our age. First, Taylor is both literally and metaphorically destroying the automotive industry. That refers back to her evident desire to develop cycle-powered energy referred to earlier. It also sends out a stark and unignorable message that Taylor is destroying American colonialism, for what is a car but a symbol of American power? She is literally taking a club to the system that created her, an act of revolution that will have profound and far-reaching consequences. But there’s also a sly and brilliant wit here, in the choice of a golf club – for clubs such as the Royal & Ancient and Augusta, the bastions of golf, have been dilatory in admitting women to their ranks. Golf, then, becomes a symbol for the entire entertainment-industrial complex in a message that is both stark and, dare I say it, unignorable.
Paradigm-smashing rating: 10