Video Of The Week: Taylor Swift feat. Kendrick Lamar

The Grammys are a predictable, pseudo-artistic mess that recognizes just about what it needs to and celebrates and rewards its own as a means of justifying its own existence, like many other award shows. Thus it needs to reward actual artistic merit once in a while but usually also needs to have the most poplar artists reap the most trophies so that the masses feel that what were force-fed for an entire year and whom they helped become millionaires did so out of merit rather than pure commercialism and the financial means of the corporations pushing them.

So, for every Arcade Fire, there has to be a Taylor Swift, a couple of Céline Dions, a Christina Aguilera, and Michael Jackson has to remain the one point of comparison that sets the standard.

This year's nominations  were all about Swift and Kendrick Lamar, so it's fitting that I feature them together in this video directed by Joseph Kahn (Britney Spears' Toxic and Womanizer, Eminem's Without Me, We Made You and Love The Way You Lie) for the remix of Bad Blood:



What's great is the sheer number of cameos in the video, in order of appearance after Swift: Selena Gomez as Arsyn, Karlie Kloss as Knockout, Lamar as Welvin Da Great, Martha Hunt as HomeSlice, Jessica Alba as Domino, Serayah as Dilemma, Lena Dunham as Lucky Fiori, Hailee Steinfeld as The Trinity, Ellie Goulding as Destructa X, GiGi Hadid as Slay-Z, Hayley Williams as The Crimson Curse, Zendaya as Cut-Throat, Lily Aldridge as Frostbyte, Ellen Pompeo as Luna, Mariska Hargitay as Justice, Cara Delevingne as Mother Chucker, and Cindy Crawford as Headmistress.

Full disclosure: I think the lyrics are god-awful (cut and done are terrible rhymes for blood, worthy of early Avril Lavigne songs, just sayin'), and I find it odd that Hayley Williams appears in the video considering "Swift's voice" sounds just like hers in the chorus; it feels like there's ghost-singing going on here, for sure.

Video Of The Week: Kendrick Lamar

I understand those who don't like this song, Alright, by Kendrick Lamar. It's not full of catchy hooks and big, thumping radio beats. And some people aren't even into hip hop; that's fine. Musical taste can hardly be argued (though I argue it on here all the time).

But the black-and-white video by Colin Tilley is no doubt a work of art. Possibly the nest video of the past five years, or at least in that conversation if I'm forgetting some. Sure, it deals with gritty issues such as racism and police brutality (well, police murdering people, which is beyond just brutality) that seem like they belong more in a documentary than in something stylistic, but this video is in the same vein as Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List in terms of depicting awfulness beautifully. And, yes, this is the same Colin Tilley who directed Nicki Minaj's Anaconda video; he's fast becoming the go-to director for high-quality, high-profile cinematography in short clips.