Taylor Swift's new video You Need to Calm Down is full of celebrity cameos. Photo / YouTube
Three writers for The New York Times discuss her You Need to Calm Down video, which is populated with LGBTQ celebrities. Not everyone sees it as a celebration.
It's Pride month and Taylor Swift is celebrating with the video for You Need to Calm Down, the second single from her upcoming album, Lover. The song argues against hate and the video is a corresponding Technicolor fantasia filled with cameos from stars of the LGBTQ universe. But reaction to the clip was mixed: Was Swift's sudden intense embrace a matter of principle, or of expediency? To discuss the video's aesthetic and reception, we gathered Jon Caramanica, a pop music critic for The New York Times; Wesley Morris, The Times' critic at large; and Caryn Ganz, The Times' pop music editor.
Jon Caramanica: In '90s hip-hop videos, cameo appearances were crucial. They let people know who your friends were, who would show up to lend their credibility. By that metric, You Need to Calm Down is the One More Chance (Remix) of performed allyship. There's Hayley Kiyoko doing archery! Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Justin Mikita getting married (by Ciara)! Ellen DeGeneres getting a "Cruel Summer" tattoo (thinking face emoji)!
The rollout of Swift's seventh album, Lover, which is due in August, has been awash in rainbow-themed imagery, and Swift is speaking directly on a matter of political and social import — LGBTQ rights. It's a topic she had barely acknowledged before October, when she formally endorsed two Democratic candidates, declaring on Instagram, "I cannot vote for someone who will not be willing to fight for dignity for ALL Americans, no matter their skin colour, gender or who they love."
But when it comes to making public statements in support of these issues, Taylor waited a relatively long time: until after Katy Perry, after Lady Gaga, after Kacey Musgraves. Presumptions of her progressivism notwithstanding, in a time when speaking out has become a critical component of celebrity, the silence was extremely loud.
And so when you are, relatively speaking, late to the game, you have to bet big. Having a video as chock-full of gay celebrities and drag queens as this (as well as the one beyond-critique gesture of 2019: a cameo from Billy Porter) is a worthy celebration, but it is also plausible cover.
Wesley Morris: But Jon, it's all gesture. I love Billy Porter as much as the planet does at the moment. But what are his three seconds meant to do? What are any of the LGBTQIA-identified people in this video — DeGeneres, Adam Lambert, the Queer Eye guys, to start — meant to signify? This is as much a music video as it is a detonated rainbow-flag piñata.
Caryn Ganz: You've both identified some of the sources of the mixed reaction to the video: the perception that there's a performative nature to Swift's allyship — she's telling, not showing. While her support for gay rights is certainly genuine, and she is now using her immense celebrity to trumpet it, some people are reading her labor here — and the fact that it's tied up in the marketing plan of an album — as having the veneer of something false (a criticism that she has faced before in different arenas).
Authenticity and facade play shifting roles in pop music and gay life. And pop stars and gay audiences have a long history: Pop music has been a sanctuary and playground, and there's an expectation that pop stars, particularly female pop stars, will nurture and honor it. But because shouting about gay rights wasn't an explicit component of Taylor's work until recently — and we should remember her roots are in Nashville, which plays by different rules — the video is seen as more jarring than the arrival of something as bluntly hokey as Lady Gaga's Born This Way, because Gaga had nurtured her gay audience from her earliest days.
Morris: Videos can be either a dream of a song or a dream of an artist. When you're good at it (when you're Madonna or Janet Jackson, Björk or Beyoncé), it can be both. Since she expanded into pop, Taylor Swift's videos have tended to betray the ingenuity of her songwriting while insisting that she gets it — that she gets all the "its." But I don't know what she's getting in You Need to Calm Down, which she co-directed. For one thing, it looks like a Vitamix did the editing. For another, the riot of auxiliary personalties — gay personalities — are in the service of her brand and persona. No one else's stardom or skill has more to do than endorse hers. Although I will say that the sight of Tan France (the Queer Eye with the Quicksilver hair) tipping his head back and downing tea straight from the pot was like watching somebody from Wonderland pledge DKE.
Caramanica: I should add here: Being in a Taylor Swift video seems like tremendous fun! Wild wardrobe options. Bold colour palette. An innate understanding that all you have to do is vamp — you're the side dish, not the entree. Your presence is the present. (With that said, I wonder who, if anyone, turned the opportunity down.)
Morris: That's a great question. But maybe no one, since the video operates with the dual higher purpose of a campaign. It's Pride month and all of that flamboyant Willy Wonkaness is meant to signal to the viewer — louder and more shablamingly than the song itself — that Swift supports and loves each letter in the queer alphabet. (Do you guys think she should have saved the spelling in the first single, Me!, for this song?) I think I'd rather have this than the tolerance lecture of, say, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis and Mary Lambert's Same Love.
But there's also something either tired, tardy or tidily opportunistic about this video. It's shown up at a moment when corporations are spending June bleeding the colors of the rainbow flag, when store windows announce that all orientations are welcome, when the avatar for your pending Uber has turned gay. I don't doubt the core sincerity or commercial power of any of this. Maybe it makes it more impossible for the bakeries of the world to deny queer customers a wedding cake.
But, in Swift's case, the lyrics of the song address trolls on the internet and those trying to deny gays rights. As a matter of political priority, would the same people who hate Taylor Swift also hate gay people? And if "yes" is the answer, is it not morally pitchy to conflate the two? And if this thing really is a virtual petition for tolerance signed by everybody from RuPaul to Ryan Reynolds (the running time, by the way, is only 3 minutes and 30 seconds!), why is the most satisfying image its final hatchet-burying moments between Swift and Katy Perry? There's something risible about the idea of these two straight, well-intended, politically hapless women providing the dismount for a plea for equal rights while actual gay people have just been throwing gay-wedding cake all over each other. These two exit that narrative, and stand in a separate, apolitical one. And what you're left with is two people who can't help but be their fullest, truest selves in a context that doesn't require all that fullness. It's camp.
Caramanica: It would have to be at least a little bit funny to really be camp, no?
In the midst of that chaos, that the saving grace for Swift is the mending of an old fence could be a demonstration that even those who had once been closed-minded can evolve — Taylor believes in change, see? But I think it's something different, something less considered: The song's lyrics conflate tensions big and small, personal and political. In the song, and especially in the video, with the Katy Konclusion, what emerges feels like a bait and switch, or really just a switch. (For what it's worth, the lyrics also misuse the word shade.)
Morris: I don't think you can have the switch without the bait! So, bait and switch it is. (And Jon, you just gave my Katy Perry kover band a name!) Anyway, it also feels important to say that ultimately this is a fine thing. We just don't like how clumsy and basic and grabby it is. But I've been thinking, in earnest, about what it might have meant for little me to happen upon this. I was presumed gay pretty early in school and, for a few years, had been mildly persecuted for it. Warhol and Haring and Baldwin — they hadn't happened to me yet. Boy George and Jermaine Stewart and The Real World found me first. And Madonna found me most.
Before she was anybody's problem, she was a great big window, this thing through which you could see a world that included people I wanted to be, people I wanted to be with, people I knew I was. At 7. At 11. At 15. And there was something about all of her racial and sexual alignments (not allyships), something about that "Vogue" video, where she's out-everything-ed by these black and Latinx dudes even as she's keeping up with them. At the height of her meaningfulness as a star and an artist, she opened windows, which feels as important as opening doors. And she did it without having to say, "Yo! I'm opening stuff up!"
This is a long way of saying that, even though the You Need to Calm Down video isn't about equality between Taylor Swift and anyone, really, in the same way, I'm sure there's some gay kid somewhere on this planet who loves Taylor Swift, who's seen her do a gay wedding and sing Shake It Off at the Stonewall Inn and star in this video and won't be rolling his eyes about some iffy album rollout or her convenient brand of corporate sponsorship. That kid will grasp enough of the video's iconography to feel seen.
Caramanica: Absolutely true, and I think that also gets at some of the friction Taylor has generated when it comes to issues like this. If she's been a supporter of progressive social causes, she's had a phenomenally huge platform for a decade now, but has barely leveraged it. You mentioned Madonna, and Caryn, you spoke about Gaga — in both cases, their embrace of marginalized and oppressed groups was central to their aesthetic position from the earliest days of their careers. They portrayed the kinship as natural, which is why, by comparison, what's on display here feels strenuous.
Ganz: You're poking at the underlying tension of the response to the video: the fact that there are different shades of allyship and enduring questions about who "gets" to be an ally, or a gay icon, and how — are allies only chosen by the gay community or can they be imposed from beyond, and is there a way for both to do important work? Conveniently, two opposing examples arrived at the same moment on Monday: Swift's You Need to Calm Down video and Robyn's Ever Again clip, inverses in nearly every way.
Taylor's video is a kandy-kolored fantasyscape populated by 29 other personalities. Robyn's has a palate of blues, greens and browns; her only co-star is a microphone stand. Taylor's is a series of meticulously interlaced scenes and narratives; Robyn's features nothing but the singer dancing and dragging herself through the sand. Swift's video screams about gay rights (and female pop star rights). Robyn's doesn't say a word. But that doesn't make it less gay; Robyn has always showed, not told. Beloved gay pop isn't always wrapped in rainbows, but in exuberance, rawness, poise, virtuosity — the audacity of radiating absolute emotional freedom.
Written by: Jon Caramanica, Wesley Morris and Caryn Ganz
© 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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