Okay so the first thing to appreciate is Wildest Dreams is a Lana Del Rey track. Not just the generally woozy instrumentation and vocals, not just the thematics, but very specific quirks - the way she pours syrup into her leading consonants (she used to sing with a twang, recall), the way she aspirates for emphasis in things like “this is getting good now”, “end” and “begins”, the transition on “say you remember me” at 2:38 where lush instrumentation abruptly drops out to a bedroom purr.

Ask me, Taylor Swift is less a musician than a master mimic who operates in the field of music (most of the time she’s mimicking her audience, which is Correct - the way to master predatory mammals, humans included, is to look them straight in the eyes and mirror them back to themselves with more confidence), and she does this occasionally.

Honestly I think it’s just to show off her professionalism as a performer and to throw a bit of shade, take a sound that’s getting attention and prove that she could trivially do that too if she wanted. (And really, is it that odd if the girl who’s known for writing hit singles just to be catty to her romantic rivals were to write hit singles to be catty to her professional rivals?)

ANYWAY, so Lana Del Rey’s brand identity is woozy Jet Age glamour Americana, and so in that context the video is kind of brilliant, the Old Hollywood international spectacle sitting right at the intersection of that and Taylor’s own 1989-cycle brand identity, the “I’m A Fucking Superstar Now” victory lap.

That’s one thing.

I guess the big thing about it in hot take land is that it’s a manifestation of colonial white priveleged racism, because that’s always the big thing about anything in hot take land. Aaron Bady, who is trying to make a name for himself as the American Richard Seymour, wrote the best of them but boil away the writing and the point is that the “Africa” setting is implicitly Kenya - colonial Kenya - which I suppose is true, and that this means the video is substantially in a colonial setting while not being about colonialism, which I suppose is true, and that it doesn’t even seem to feel any obligation to be about colonialism, which I suppose is true. Which seems about right for a Taylor Swift video tbh. So I wouldn’t say he’s wrong, just… tangent to anything interesting.

One point I think he could have stood to make though is that when you look at some of those shots - a boy with his arms around a girl as they gaze upon a golden field, etc. - this is actually some of the most countryfied imagery she’s used for a few album cycles.

So if you want to talk about Africa and whiteness and ownership, maybe mention how the video models whites-in-Africa using an established vocabulary of relationship between land and the reproductive unit drawn from an artistic tradition founded on settler-colonial volkishness and white indigeneity.

Or not. For those of us more interested in Taylor Swift in herself, the interesting thing is how the visuals in the video for what’s possibly the last single off 1989 almost come off as an attempt to retroactively place the song, and by extension the album, as much more in line with previous Tayswift canon. Shots like that attach a countryfied image to her first not-at-all country release.

But beyond that is the plot - there is a desirable boy, there is a girl (Swift), there is romantic tension between them that ends with the girl’s heart being broken but an assurance that this is error and a correct analysis would place her as most desirable.

And while that isn’t completely incompatible with the lyrics, it’s not something you could have extrapolated from the lyrics alone. (Really, things like “I can see the end as it begins” better suggest, as with other tracks on the album, an acceptance of relationships as distracting amusements with expiration dates.)

What it IS, though, is the signature Taylor Swift plot from her earlier albums. Which means that at the end of an album-cycle that was explicitly themed around “I’m not the heartbroken country girl anymore”, we get this almost after-the-fact “…or am I still, just a superstar now?”

And that’s interesting.