A few days ago, Taylor Swift released the video for her new single, "Shake It Off".Among other things, the video features her singing and dancing alongside twerking women and breakdancers.Earl Sweatshirtjumpedon Twitterto criticize Swift for her "inherently offensive and ultimately harmful" video, while admitting that he hadn't yet watched it. He said it was "perpetuating black stereotypes to the same demographic of white girls who hide their prejudice by proclaiming their love of the culture."
Now, the video's director, Mark Romanek, has responded to Sweatshirt's accusations in an interview with Vulture. He said:
I'm a fan of his and I think he's a really interesting artist. (I posted a Vine to one of his tracks once.) But he stated clearly that he hadn't seen the video and didn't even intend to watch it. So, respectfully, that sort of invalidates his observations from the get-go. And it's this one uninformed tweet that got reported on and rehashed, which started this whole "controversy." We simply choose styles of dance that we thought would be popular and amusing and cast the best dancers that were presented to us without much regard to race or ethnicity. If you look at it carefully, it's a massively inclusive piece. It's very, very innocently and positively intentioned. And let's remember it's a satirical piece. It's playing with a whole range of music-video tropes and clichs and stereotypes.
Then, he said the video is "quite moving" to him and that Sweatshirt should give it another shot:
And this is why, I think, if Earl Sweatshirt was open-minded enough to take the four minutes to watch it, he might see what the larger, humanistic, and utterly color-blind message was intended to be.
Watch the video here:
Read our interview with Earl from last year. Watch his episode of Pitchfork.tv's "Over/Under":
