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Post by Admin on Mar 1, 2020 18:29:24 GMT
You would be forgiven for losing track of all the high-profile music videos that came out in the last 36 hours. Between new efforts from BTS, Harry Styles, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, J. Balvin and Doja Cat, there’s a lot of new footage to consume. But you’re doing yourself a disservice if you don’t watch Swift’s new video for “The Man,” which marks the singer’s solo directorial debut and credits her as both writer and star. The video is both a testament to the value of creative autonomy and a fittingly clever accompaniment to one of the best songs off Swift’s latest album, Lover. “The Man” opens with a shot of a high-flying business executive looking out the window of his corner office, hands shoved in pockets, head cocked slightly. The exec turns around and—it’s Swift, styled as a man! Of course it’s Swift! Did you really expect anything else? Her CEO bro alter ego struts through the office, wadding up boring reports, fist-bumping employees and forcing everybody to applaud his middling achievements. More ridiculous, gender-specific hijinks ensue: manspreading and puffing a cigar on a crowded subway, berating business associates while partying with a flock of gorgeous models on a yacht, earning the adoration of strangers for showing a modicum of interest in a child at the park. It’s all exaggerated and cartoonish in a self-aware way, an attitude that characterizes Swift’s most memorable videos. Obviously, not every man acts like her character; that’s not the point. The point is to make a caricature of the buffoonish men who feel the need to criticize successful women like Swift for merely existing and dissect every public decision they make, whereas their male counterparts would receive praise for the same actions. With “The Man”—both song and video—Swift strikes the perfect balance of gravity and accessibility. Musically, it’s light years ahead of Lover’s first single, the nonsensically childish “ME!”, and its message lands much better than “You Need to Calm Down,” which was criticized as an insincere display of allyship upon release. On “The Man,” Swift doesn’t compare her oppression to that of other marginalized groups; she gives a frank account of how easy things aren’t for her, based purely on the fact that she’s a woman. Swift has had a recent political awakening of sorts, as evidenced by her new Netflix doc, Miss Americana, and the quietly progressive “The Man” is perhaps the most successful example of this newfound outspokenness across Lover. Over the past day and a half, “The Man” has earned nearly 13 million YouTube views. That’s a far cry from the 65.2 million views “ME!” earned in its first 24 hours, the second-biggest YouTube debut behind BTS’s “Boy with Luv.” It’s unlikely “The Man” will rise to the commercial heights of “ME!” or “You Need to Calm Down,” both of which peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and benefited from Swift’s highly anticipated return to the limelight. Nevertheless, “The Man” is an important artistic achievement for Swift, and she has finally delivered the single and video that Lover deserved.
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Post by Admin on Mar 3, 2020 18:06:53 GMT
Swift, the gatekeeper of both pop music and feminism, released her brand-new music video for “The Man” on Thursday. It features the singer-songwriter in drag as a dirtbag character named “Tyler Swift,” and is filled with little Swiftian easter eggs, like a voiceover from The Rock and her album titles spray-painted in a subway station. But what really got me was how queer the experience of watching Taylor Swift in drag was for me. Mostly, I was left with questions—some about the video, others deeply internal and existential. This is everything that came up for me, both superficially and emotionally, while watching “The Man.” A badly-tailored and ill-fitting suit. A disagreeable tie. A haircut clearly done by a Republican. Is this… Donald Trump Jr. cosplay? Obviously, there are some clear parallels between this video and The Wolf of Wall Street, which makes sense given the lyric, “I’d be just like Leo, in Saint Tropez.” What I love about this video is Taylor’s clear choice to make her “The Man” character completely middling—the kind of mediocre-looking, poorly outfitted white man that is so often heralded in our society. An abrasively unexceptional Donald Trump Jr., rather than an endearingly vanilla Roman Roy. Has Taylor Swift been on the subway? I assume she has, given her penchant for both New York City and London. But as I watched Tyler Swift manspread on the train, smoking a cigar and ashing on another passenger’s lap, I couldn’t help but think, I’ve seen way worse on the New York subway. A Martin Shkreli-looking motherfucker with no spatial awareness is just your run-of-the-mill, humdrum prance through the Big Apple. Talk to me when there’s a pack of Shkrelis staring threateningly at you. Talk to me when a rat scurries across your toes. Talk to me when you’re completely alone in a subway car with just your thoughts and Steve Buscemi (seriously, this happened to me last week). Around the 1-minute mark, my eyes went blurry with gay. Tyler Swift pisses on a wall in the subway station and when he walks away, we see that he has peed in what can only be described as unicorn blood. This isn’t so much as a question as it is a statement that yes, undeniably, Tyler Swift has pissed in unicorn blood—very queer. I’ve watched Harry Potter and I know what it looks like and that it’s canonically gay. In the next scene, Tyler is partying on a yacht with a bunch of beautiful women dancing around him. Is this a fantasy ripped from the pages of a baby gay’s middle school diary? Imagining yourself as a lothario protagonist in a story that’s intended to condemn patriarchy? This is Sapphic—just check my tragic sketch books from eighth grade. And to hammer that nail in the coffin, the following scene shows Tyler leaving a naked woman in bed in a hotel room. Is this a repressed memory? A shame dream? I’m seeing the decorative eclipsed moon on the wall, the stifling, prison-like taupe walls, and Tyler leaving a nude woman in a dark room and closing the door behind him, and I'm thinking, this is the personification of repression. This is my repression room—a cold, dark representation of the things I want that I locked up as a teenager, only to return to unconsciously alongside my sleep paralysis demon. None of this is an accusation toward or theory about Swift’s sexuality so much as it is a reflection on my own experiences as a queer person and my inability to see anything clearly through these lesbian-colored glasses. That said, Tyler glumly exits the repression room, then runs beaming down a hallway, high-fiving a series of hands that are painted the colors of the rainbow. I don’t know, man. In the last scene, the playback stops, the video cuts, and our reality shifts. We zoom out of the tennis court set to reveal Swift, like actual Taylor Swift, in the director’s chair, wearing a flannel around her waist, sitting next to another female producer. She tells her actor, Tyler, that he needs to appear “sexier” and “more likeable,” before complimenting a woman with a small role as the ball girl (played by influencer Loren Gray), on her performance. It’s as if the hellish elements of the patriarchy that we live in, of which are depicted in the music video, melt away, and it’s replaced by something else…something beautiful, which leads me to my final question: Is this Swift’s official signaling of The Matriarchy? Because if it is, I’m ready to riot at midnight. I, too, have been “directed by Taylor Swift” for the last decade of my life—and if you think I won’t follow her out of my cold, dark repression room and on to the frontlines of battle, you’re wrong.
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Post by Admin on Mar 7, 2020 0:41:15 GMT
On Friday, nearly one week after Taylor Swift premiered the music video for her feminist anthem “The Man,” the 30-year-old singer released a behind-the-scenes clip that gave fans a closer look at how she transformed into “Tyler Swift,” the misogynistic and disrespectful titular character she played in the video. Taking on the role meant that Swift had to spend a significant time in the glam chair, at the hands of makeup artist Bill Corso and his team. As Swift explained, the process “took five hours every morning” — with Corso and company using prosthetics, wigs, and makeup to turn her into the brunette, bearded man. She even wore muscle suits under her clothes in order to fill out her manly look. Though it was an intensive task, Swift put a lot of trust in Corso. “It’s been a joy because Bill Corso’s been doing it,” she said. “I’ve worked with him once before when he turned me into a zombie for the ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ video.” “I had no idea what they do to your body to make it look different, I have muscle suits on underneath things,” she explained. “I don’t even want to talk to what else, I don’t even want to tell you about it, this is a family show.”
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Post by Admin on Mar 10, 2020 23:53:03 GMT
Taylor Swift unveiled a new behind-the-scenes look from the set of the music video for her new single "The Man" on Tuesday (March 10). "Here’s more footage of behind the scenes of me directing The Man video with a female voice and demeanor/ dude body and face! Just to make your day weirder!" she wrote on Twitter alongside a sneak peek of the footage. In the clip, the superstar explains why she decided to make her solo directorial debut with the gender-bending visual -- and turns out, it was partially out of convenience. "I wanted to use a female director but it just so happened that I couldn't really get it done in time with anybody else, 'cause everybody's busy," she says with a laugh. "So I was like, 'You know, I know exactly what I want this video to be; I know exactly who I would use as DP and as AD. Why don't I just try this -- directing for the first time alone? It just was the easiest and quickest way to get this video done the way that I wanted to do it." Featured as the fourth single from 2019's Lover, "The Man" has so far peaked just outside the Top 20 of the Hot 100, cresting at No. 23.
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Post by Admin on Mar 22, 2020 18:42:22 GMT
Taylor Swift is making time a home a bit more entertaining, and the songstress uploaded a video to Instagram on Friday (March 20) to show a hilarious behind-the-scenes moment from her "The Man" music video. http://instagram.com/p/B99vgMsjAqr In the tennis scene at the end of the clip, Swift's dad Scott plays the umpire who makes an unfavorable call--leading to the pop star's "man" persona having a full-blown meltdown. "Basically I started pelting my dad with tennis balls, which was exhilarating i think for both of us. it was a real bonding experience," Swift jokes in the snippet, adding that her dad should now launch an acting career. "Great job, dad, that was exquisite acting," she's heard telling her father after hitting him in the face a few times with tennis balls. The behind-the-scenes ends with a very important disclaimer: "No men were harmed in the making of this video (Except my dad)."
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