Taylor Swift 'Shake It Off' Video Controversy: Director Responds To Earl Sweatshirt

Taylor Swift's video for "Shake It Off" didn't take much time to dominate YouTube screens.

But it was also immediately embroiled in controversy after rapper Earl Sweatshirt sent these tweets:

The resulting social media storm thrust the video into a race debate, but director Mark Romanek did his best to diffuse the situation in a recent interview with Vulture.

"I'm a fan of (Earl's) and I think he's a really interesting artist," Romanek said. "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 clichés and stereotypes.

Romanek, a notable film director who will take on The Shining prequel next year, is primarily known for his history in the music video business.

But when it came to "Shake It Off," he mostly let Swift run the show.

"In all the videos I've done over the years, I'd say pretty much all of them were my own concept," he said. "But this basic idea was all Taylor's. We met and she told me that she wanted to make a sort of paean to the awkward ones, the "uncool" kids that are actually cooler than the "cool" kids. She said she wanted to shoot all these styles of dance and then be the individualist dork in the midst of these established genres. And that she somehow wanted her fans involved. I loved that idea, so over the following week or so, we narrowed down our choices for styles of dance. I think she imagined it in more natural settings and I suggested giving it a starker, more minimalist look. And I suggested the idea of incorporating her fans as a climax, for the ending as a kind of surprise."

Tags

Taylor Swift, Earl Sweatshirt