Taylor Swift can’t dance

We know this. That’s supposed to be the point, I guess. Lainey theorized after the Delicate music video dropped that Taylor’s horrific, oh-god-why-am-I-watching-this dancing is deliberate. She doesn’t care that she’s the 2018 Napoleon Dynamite. She’s dancing like no one is watching – except that we’re all watching and she knows this. I think that she does care. 

The video may have been intended as a tongue in cheek “look how much I don’t care that Carlton Banks is a better dancer than me!” expression of freedom from public scrutiny and love for Joe Alwyn or whatever but now that Taylor Swift has released two behind-the-scenes “dance rehearsal” videos, I’m convinced that she thinks she’s a great dancer. She wants us to see her dancer “process.” She’s very serious in these videos. There’s a split screen of the “rehearsal” and the actual music video. I keep using quotations because there is no way these videos are actually of Taylor’s music video rehearsal. 

Part 1:

Part 2: 

Where’s her choreographer? The caption doesn’t shout out any of the people who must have helped Taylor Swift, She Who Cannot Dance, get to the level we see in the Delicate video. If Taylor really wants to show us her work, she would give credit to the person who actually came up with the moves she’s butchering. Instead, she’s strutting around in her perfect cropped co-ord set ALONE in a perfectly lit dance studio doing the dance exactly the way she does it in the video. It’s like she rehearsed for the rehearsal. 

Listen, I know choreography is hard. I’ve taken a few dance classes and good lord, dancing is hard as f-ck. The fact that Beyoncé does what she does is goddamn miraculous and a culmination of a sh-t ton of hard work. 

Compare the Taylor “rehearsal” footage you just saw to this clip of Beyoncé learning the choreography for Run The World (Girls) with the Tofo Tofo dancers. 

 

First of all, Beyoncé gives them all the credit. Second, we see her stumbling over the choreography at first and trying to learn it. We see her WORK. Taylor Swift showed us the time and effort it takes to write a song with the making of some of the reputation tracks, including Delicate. So, why give us rehearsal footage at all if it’s going to be a perfectly curated, smoke and mirrors bullsh-t? 

I used to like the song Delicate. It was one of the few strong reputation songs I thought should have been released earlier. Now, when I hear Delicate, all I see is Taylor Swift embarrassingly writhing around barefoot on the subway, which is my literal nightmare. Delicate is ruined. 

I just spent 20 minutes doing a deep dive but I haven’t been able to find who choreographed Delicate yet. Maybe the choreographer doesn’t want credit for this mess? Or maybe they’re hiding now that everyone is calling out the video for ripping off Spike Jonze? 

IF Taylor choreographed the video herself, which is basically what is implied through her posts but highly unlikely, then she should have showed us THAT process. That’s the work I’d rather seen than Taylor’s faux “rehearsal” footage.