Let’s get this out of the way first; I do not hate Taylor Swift, nor this song. I used to be more annoyed by Swift’s brand of faux earnesty, but as time has passed, I’ve grown more indifferent than irritated. That is, except for “Mean”, a song she wrote criticizing an unnamed person for the awful crime of saying not-so-things about her, and more than that, insinuating that this person is damaged emotionally and lonely because he/she dared to say that Taylor Swift is not a great singer. Hating one song about Taylor Swift railing against haters would seemingly stack the odds against me liking “Shake it Off”, but I… didn’t hate it? Perhaps it’s because Swift wisely chooses to talk about how she’s just going to ignore these unnamed haters, instead of launching a hate campaign against them. It’s a dumber, more generic song than “Mean”, but I’ll take it over that monstrosity any day of the week. And that is the last you’ll hear about the song here.

Mark Romanek has been directing music videos for nearly 30 years now. In those 30 years, he often places an emphasis on images other than the ones in the video. Images from old movies and other music videos (in his career, he’s borrowed imagery from the likes of Nosferatu, surrealist artwork, anime, The 400 Blows, and Midnight Cowboy, the last two in the same video). But perhaps more crucially, the images of the artists he directs. Romanek likes to play with the set images of his collaborators, sometimes poking fun and other times reinforcing them (his video for Johnny Cash’s “Hurt” is somber, but for a video where three of its participants would be dead within months of its premiere, Romanek notes that it was a very fun shoot). In his video for Madonna’s “Rain”, we see Madonna being prepped and readied to play up her image on screen (the “Rain” video is essentially about the making of itself). His video for Janet Jackson’s “Got ’til it’s Gone” was made as a reaction to hip-hop videos portraying black culture mostly with sexism and materialism, and borrowed imagery from the apartheid-era Drum Magazine. Even looking at his film work, One Hour Photo basically creates a wacky Robin Williams character (a friendly photo technician who loves one family more than the others) who is then played as a sociopath. But perhaps his video for “Shake it Off” is most in debt to Romanek’s video for the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Can’t Stop”. That video was told with mostly static compositions, placing the RHCP members with items and positions inspired by those of artist Erwin Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures (there’s a credit acknowledging the Wurm inspiration at the end of the video). Much like that video, this video puts Taylor Swift through a series of “images” in mostly static frames (Swift is sometimes fighting to stay in frame); the ballerina, the dancer, the Lady Gaga parody, and, most controversially, the hip-hop enthusiast (no matter what I do to reclaim the video as an auteurist work, the twerking was… not the best idea, regardless of Swift or Romanek’s intentions), all of which taking place against a variety of bland backdrops. According to an interview with Romanek, the idea for the video was Swift’s, but it still fits snuggly within in the context of Romanek’s career, even if it’s nowhere near his best.

R.I.P. Harris Savides

Look on the bright side, you didn’t have to shoot a Taylor Swift video