Does the video romanticize colonialism?
During Sunday night's VMAs, Taylor Swift debuted the video for her song "Wildest Dreams," and it immediately received tons of backlash.
The authors wrote:Swift's music is entertaining for many. She should absolutely be able to use any location as a backdrop. But she packages our continent as the backdrop for her romantic songs devoid of any African person or storyline, and she sets the video in a time when the people depicted by Swift and her co-stars killed, dehumanized and traumatized millions of Africans. That is beyond problematic.
The Daily Dot's Nico Lang also pointed out problems with the video, writing: "The video wants to have its old-school Hollywood romance but ends up eating some old-school Hollywood racism, too."
'Wildest Dreams' is a song about a relationship that was doomed, and the music video concept was that they were having a love affair on location away from their normal lives. This is not a video about colonialism but a love story on the set of a period film crew in Africa, 1950.