Band -Aids don't fix bullet holes. I mean, it's
one of those lines, isn't it? You hear it one
time and it's just, it's stuck in your head for
like a decade. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. It was the
caption on a million Instagram posts back in,
what, 2015? Exactly. Welcome back to the Deep
Dive. Today, we aren't just talking about a Taylor
Swift song. We're talking about bad blood. And,
you know, I want to approach this a little differently
because when I look back at the 1989 era, this
track. It kind of feels like The Anomaly. How
so? Well, it wasn't the best written song on
the album. It wasn't the catchiest. In fact,
a lot of critics, they absolutely hated it. And
that's the paradox we're here to unpack, right?
Yeah. How does a song that critics called, I
think, petulant was one word. Directionless.
Directionless. How does that become a Grammy
-winning, record -breaking juggernaut? It feels
like a glitch in the matrix. So to figure this
out, we've pulled a massive stack of sources.
We've got the original reviews from places like
NME and The Guardian that were surprisingly harsh.
So had the interview transcripts from Rolling
Stone and GQ. That's really where the whole narrative
got built. Right. And we're even looking at some
academic papers on feminism and celebrity culture
to really understand the whole squad phenomenon.
I think the squad is key. But before we even
get to these supermodels and the explosions,
we have to look at the music itself, the foundation.
Because Bad Blood really represents a very, very
specific moment in her career. The pivot. the
pivot. This was the 1989 album, late 2014. This
is the moment she officially, you know, killed
off the country music persona. Completely. She
traded the banjo for the synthesizer. She said
she was inspired by late 80s synth pop. Yeah.
And to make sure she nailed it, she didn't just
hire a producer. She hired the architects of
modern pop. Max Martin and Shellback. The Swedish
heavy hitters. Yeah. These guys are basically
scientists when it comes to crafting a pop hit.
The executive produced the whole album. But here's
the thing that gets me. When you listen to the
original album version of Bad Blood, you know,
the one that dropped before the famous remix,
it's weirdly stripped back. It is. It's really
minimal. It's driven almost entirely by these
like stomping, booming drums and these pulsing
keyboards. It's aggressive, sure, but also kind
of hollow. The New York Times made this really
specific comparison that I had never caught before.
They said the drums sounded like Billy Squire.
The big beat, right. It's this classic rock track
from the 80s that, funnily enough, became one
of the most sampled drum breaks in hip hop history.
So she's channeling that arena rock chanting
vibe. Exactly. NME called it a bitter stomp and
said it evoked the Beastie Boys. Which makes
sense. It's really more of a chant than a melody.
And that simplicity was where the critics just
dug in. I was actually shocked going back and
reading how negative the initial reaction was.
It was so polarizing. So on one side you had
a publication like The Quietest enjoying the
attitude. They called it sass and bile. They
liked the aggression. But then you have Clash
magazine. They were just brutal. They called
it a litany of cliches said to directionless
thumps. Ouch. Directionless thumps. That's gotta
hurt. And the record called her delivery petulant.
And, you know, even today, when you look at retrospective
rankings from Rolling Stone or Paste, Bad Blood
is almost always near the bottom of her entire
discography. Musically, it just didn't have the
complexity of style. Or Blank Space? Not at all.
So if you're Swift and her team, you've got this
song that critics are calling the weak link.
The logical thing to do is bury it, right? Leave
it as an album track and move on. But she didn't.
She made it the fourth single. Why? Because the
song had something the other tracks didn't. It
had a narrative. A very public, very juicy narrative.
The feud. Precisely. I mean, the lyrics are about
betrayal. Did you think we'd be fine? Still got
scars on my back from your knife. It's not subtle.
Not at all. But she took it a step further in
Rolling Stone interview in September 2014. I
remember this so clearly. She basically tells
the interviewer, look, this isn't about a guy.
It's about another female artist. And she gave
very specific details. She said this person was
a close friend who tried to, and I'm quoting
here, sabotage an entire arena tour by hiring
people out from under her. Which is brilliant
because it moves the drama from a romantic breakup,
which everyone expected from her, to like a corporate
dispute. It's about business ethics. It was a
genius deflection. She told the press she wanted
to clarify it wasn't about a boy to avoid the
usual gossip. But really, she just swapped one
kind of gossip for another. And it ignited a
wildfire. Everyone immediately started trying
to connect the dots to Katy Perry. The touring
history, the shared dancers. It all fit. It fit
perfectly. Chuck Klosterman wrote a great analysis
of this for GQ. And he argued that by being ambiguous,
but also giving these very specific clues, she
propagated the existence of a different rumor.
She gamified the song. Exactly. You weren't just
listening to a track anymore. You were trying
to solve a puzzle. That's marketing genius. But
a narrative can only carry a song so far. If
the music is just directionless thumps, people
aren't going to keep listening on the radio.
And that brings us to the second pivot. May 2015.
Swift decides to release it as a single, but
she knows the album version isn't strong enough,
so she overhauls it completely. And in comes
Kendrick Lamar. Which at the time was a huge
curveball. I mean, you have the Polish princess
of pop and the king of West Coast hip hop who
is fresh off releasing To Pimp a Butterfly. It
felt like two different universes just colliding.
But it wasn't just him adding a verse, was it?
The whole production changed. Oh, it had to.
They brought in a producer named Ilya, and he
didn't just polish the track. He modernized it.
He added trap beats, those fluctuating hi -hats,
these resonant kick drums. Which was the sound
of 2015. That trap influence was starting to
take over the charts, and she just jumped right
on it. It gave the song the weight that the original
was missing. And honestly... Lamar's verses did
a lot of the heavy lifting. The Guardian called
the collaboration a masterstroke. They felt his
verses were potent and sort of covered up the
simplicity of the chorus. Pretty much. And it
worked. The remix shot to number one on the Billboard
Hot 100. And here's a stat that just blew my
mind. That was Kendrick Lamar's first number
one hit. Wait, really? Yes. The guy who wrote
All Right and King Kunta? His first number one
was a Taylor Swift remix? It was, which just
goes to show the sheer commercial power she had
at that moment. The song broke the record for
most single -week plays in the history of the
pop songs chart. Wow. But let's be real. The
radio play was huge, but the cultural explosion
that came from the video? Because Bad Blood wasn't
just a music video. No, it was a summer blockbuster.
Directed by Joseph Kahn, produced by Swift herself,
it premiered at the Billboard Music Awards. Just
the premiere itself was a statement. And the
aesthetic was this pure, like, neo -noir, Sin
City, Tron, Kill Bill kind of vibe. But it was
the rollout that I found so fascinating. It was
the birth of the squad. The marketing for it
was relentless. Every day, a new character poster
would just drop on Instagram. And it wasn't just,
here's Selena Gomez. No, it was Selena Gomez's
R - Listen, Lena Dunham is Lucky Fury. It was
like the Avengers. You had Gigi Hadid, Zendaya,
Cindy Crawford, Jessica Alba. I mean, she was
basically saying, look at my Rolodex. Look at
the army I can summon. The Washington Post commented
on exactly that. They saw it as this display
of raw power. It wasn't just about friendship.
It was about status. She had the access to mobilize
the biggest names in entertainment for a four
minute video. And the plot mirrored the real
life feud perfectly. Swift is Catastrophe, Selena
Gomez is Arsene. They're fighting together and
then boom, betrayal. Arsene kicks her out of
a skyscraper window. Band -Aids don't fix bullet
holes. Exactly. Catastrophe survives, creates
this training camp for supermodels and comes
back for revenge. It ends with this huge face
-off in a burning London. It broke the Vivo 24
-hour viewing record with like 20 million views.
But this is where the conversation gets a little
more nuanced. Because while the video was a massive
hit, The critical analysis of the squad wasn't
all positive. Yeah, this is where the whole mean
girls critique started to come in. It was divisive.
So on one hand, you had Time magazine praising
it. They saw it as Swift finally shedding her
victim narrative. She wasn't the girl crying
with her guitar anymore. She was an action hero.
But on the other hand, isn't there something
a bit... exclusionary about it. That was the
big debate. The Irish Times called it a cult
of personality. The Times compared it to a mean
girl style clique. And the main criticism was
that this brand of feminism felt like a VIP section.
Right. Some scholars argued that it represented
a feminism that's only accessible if you are,
you know, wealthy, famous and. Conventionally
gorgeous. It's sort of reframed female friendship
as a weapon. You're either on the team or you're
the target. And there was an ironic twist that
a literature scholar named Hannah Laura Roth
pointed out. In the video, Kendrick Lamar's character
is named Welvin the Great. He's basically the
boss. He sits behind the desk while all the women
train. So you have this. supposed anthem of female
empowerment but a guy is still technically in
charge roth's argument was that by structuring
it that way the video actually replicated the
patriarchal structures it was trying to fight
yeah so it's a complicated legacy but complexity
didn't stop the awards it won the grammy for
best music video and it saturated the culture
so deeply that we started seeing parodies everywhere
you know you made it when how it should have
ended there's a version bat blood a classic But
there were serious parodies too, right? There
were. There was a really notable one about the
UK tampon tax using the song's aggressive fighting
spirit to protest taxes on sanitary products,
which shows the song had crossed over from just
being a pop tune to being like... a vehicle for
protest speaking of different versions we have
to talk about the covers we have to talk about
ryan adams ah the ryan adams 1989 cover album
that was such a strange interesting moment in
music history he covered the entire album in
the style of bruce springsteen's nebraska so
he took bad blood a song that is defined by its
huge production and booming drums and just stripped
it completely naked turn it into this old country
folk pop ballad it's melancholic it's sad I have
to say, I actually kind of liked it. It felt
honest. Well, critics were split. Spin actually
preferred it to Swift's version. They said he
stripped away the sneering obnoxiousness of the
original and found a real song underneath it
all. But Billboard disagreed. Billboard thought
it was the worst cover on his album. Their argument
was that Bad Blood relies so heavily on its sonic
distinctiveness, the bombast, the production,
that when you take that away, there's not much
of a song left. Which brings us right back to
the original question. Is Bad Blood a good song
or is it just great production? That is the enduring
question, isn't it? So fast forward to 2023.
We're in the Taylor's version era. Swift is rerecording
her catalog. We get 1989 Taylor's version. And
the big question was. Does Kendrick come back?
And he did. Which was amazing. Swift called it
surreal and bewildering that he agreed to re
-record his verses almost a decade later. So
did the re -recording change our understanding
of the song at all? Or was it just a copy -paste
job? Musically, the arrangement was almost identical.
She wasn't trying to reinvent the wheel. She
was trying to devalue the original master. But
a lot of critics noticed the vocals had shifted.
Better. Worse. Just different. Some felt her
vocals sounded angrier, maybe with more depth
and maturity. Rolling Stone UK called it astounding.
They felt the added years gave her voice more
authority. But Pitchfork was still not impressed.
Pitchfork remained critical, yeah. They called
the re -recording bratty and boring. Their argument
was basically that a woman in her 30s rehashing
a high school -style feud from her 20s just didn't
land the same way. That's a fair point. The anger
of 2015 might not fit the vibe of 2023, but the
fact that we're still talking about it and that
the rerecording still did massive numbers, well,
it proves the strategy worked. Absolutely. If
you zoom out, Bad Blood is just a masterclass
in narrative control. So let's recap the journey.
We started with an album track that most critics
called The Weakest Link on 1989. And through
a strategic remix with the hottest rapper in
the world. A weaponized marketing campaign with
a squad of supermodels. In a music video that
was basically an action movie. She turned a B
-side into a cultural phenomenon. She didn't
just release a song, she created an event. And
it highlights her ability to reinvent her own
image. In the You Belong With Me days, she was
the underdog on the bleachers. With bad blood,
she became the cheer captain and the football
team and the owner of the stadium. Right. It
was this aggressive declaration that she wasn't
asking for permission anymore. And that transition
is what the 1989 era... was all about. So here's
a thought to leave you with today. We live in
an era now where squads are digital. You have
influencer houses, collab videos, public beefs
played out on TikTok duets. Did bad blood write
the playbook for how modern celebrities fight
their battles? Is it less about who has the better
art and more about who can mobilize the biggest
army of influence? That is the million dollar
question. It certainly feels like it changed
the rules of engagement. Something to think about
the next time you see a carefully curated group
photo on your feed. Thanks for joining us on
this deep dive. Until next time.