My social media pages are being constantly inundated by Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift does this, Taylor Swift does that. It's all I see, but you won't get any complaints over here. She is my queen, but lately I've seen a shift. This shift was caused by her "Wildest Dreams" music video, and I still don't have any complaints regarding it, but I may be alone in that.
Her video takes place on an early-20th-century movie set where she is the lead falling in love with a very attractive man (shocking for a T-Swift video, I know). The movie is filmed in Africa, with African scenery and animals playing a prominent role. However, beyond the giraffes and lions, African culture is not depicted at all.
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Critics are slamming her for this very reason. Taylor's Africa is romantic and beautiful, but colonial Africa is a very different story. Her video didn't give colonial Africa a voice, and many people are taking great offense to it.
The director of this video begs to differ, saying that not only were there people of African decent shown in the video, but the main creative contributors behind the video were of color as well. Although her video may depict a more romanticized version, they made attempts to be true to historical contexts.
I guess my view is somewhere in between. Is Taylor Swift romanticizing colonial Africa? Yes. But I'm just trying to think about how this would have gone if it was flipped around. What if she tried to authentically represent the African culture in her video? Would people have jumped on her and accused her of succumbing to African stereotypes? Also, what if her video accurately represented colonial Africa. What if it was harsh and cruel and brutal? What then? Does that fit here? Can a pop star's music video hold the weight of a nation? Should it?
Accurately portraying other cultures and also acknowledging the brutality of the past is imperative. But where is its place? Is that something that all music videos should be incorporating? I do not believe that Taylor painted a clear picture of the realities of colonial Africa, no. But her director states that they took into account the fact that if this situation did happen in this time period, there would be more white people playing these roles -- because that's how it was then. That's fair, right?
None of this was intentional. I guess that's the critic's point, and that we should start being intentional when we represent these bigger issues.
