Taylor Swift made headlines at the VMAs - both for her surprise performance with Nicki Minaj as well as her suspected "ambient sounds" when introducing her new music video that had us all LOLing. No stranger to controversy, her new video also had her making some negative headlines as well. Taylor took the time on the VMA pre-show to debut her latest music video for "Wildest Dreams." Directed by her collaborator for previous videos "Blank Space" and "Bad Blood" Joseph Kahn, the video featured Taylor and co-star Scott Eastwood in a doomed on-set romance in an on-location film set taking place in 1950 Africa. Immediately following airing, the video started to receive criticism for glorifying colonialism.
The most notable critique came from Nairobi-born Viviane Rutabingwa and James Kassaga Arinaitwe who grew up in rural Uganda who wrote on NPR "Swift’s music is entertaining for many. She should absolutely be able to use any location as a backdrop. But she packages our continent as the backdrop for her romantic songs devoid of any African person or storyline, and she sets the video in a time when the people depicted by Swift and her co-stars killed, dehumanized and traumatized millions of Africans. That is beyond problematic."
The Huffinton Post's Lauren Duca added "Instead of the cultural appropriation that has become almost status quo in today's pop music, Swift has opted for the bolder option of actually just embodying the political exploitation of a region and its people." The director Joseph Kahn soon came to Taylor's defense in an official statement that read "‘Wildest Dreams’ is a song about a relationship that was doomed, and the music video concept was that they were having a love affair on location away from their normal lives. This is not a video about colonialism but a love story on the set of a period film crew in Africa, 1950."
He went on to describe the diversity behind the creation of the video writing "The reality is not only were there people of color in the video, but the key creatives who worked on this video are people of color. I am Asian American, the producer Jil Hardin is an African American woman, and the editor Chancler Haynes is an African American man. We cast and edited this video. We collectively decided it would have been historically inaccurate to load the crew with more black actors as the video would have been accused of rewriting history. This video is set in the past by a crew set in the present and we are all proud of our work." He has since tweeted alluding to the controversy with some questionable jokes.
I never said I have black friends I'm not racist. I said I have SUPER HOT black friends I'm not racist.
Asians can't be racist. White or black, we don't care, all dogs taste the same to us.
Taylor has still not addressed the controversy. She is donating all the profits of the video to the African Parks Foundation of America. Watch the video above.
