Music

Taylor Swift Becomes A Cyborg Assassin To Beat Up A Katy Perry Surrogate In The New ‘Bad Blood’ Video

Subtle!

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After an exhaustive publicity-tease schedule since the beginning of May, Taylor Swift has finally debuted the new video for ‘Bad Blood’ at the Billboard Awards, and it’s a glorious four-minute saga of betrayal, revenge, sci-fi and explosions. It starts with Selena Gomez double-crossing Swift’s secret agent character, stealing her top-secret briefcase and kicking her out of a window, and it only ramps up from there.

Pretty much everyone is in this thing: Kendrick Lamar as a scientific mastermind, Lena Dunham as a chain-smoking badass, Jessica Alba, Cara Delevingne, Mariska Hargitay from Law and Order: SVU. It’s a lot of effort to put into what is essentially a dig at Katy Perry; Swift has said before that the song’s confrontational lyrics are directed at another female pop star, and considering Perry poached a bunch of backup dancers from Swift’s ‘Red’ tour, she’s the most likely candidate.

As declarations of “I don’t like this person” go, recruiting a celebrity assassin army and blowing up London isn’t very subtle, but it’s not a bad way to start either.