Taylor Swift at the Billboard Music Awards. (Image courtesy: AFP)
Pop superstar Taylor Swift offered a new personal transformation Sunday as she debuted a video of herself as a feminist action hero in collaboration with rapper Kendrick Lamar.
Opening the Billboard Music Awards, Taylor premiered
Bad Blood as the fourth single from her album
1989, which was by far the top-selling solo album last year.
The single version features Lamar, one of the most acclaimed rappers of the moment, in a hip-hop duet - a once unthinkable step for the 25-year-old Taylor, who started off in country music before shifting to pop.
The song - whose chorus runs, "Baby, now we've got bad blood/You know it used to be mad love" - is about Taylor's fallout with another pop star, widely speculated to be Katy Perry.
But the video, directed by veteran music director Joseph Kahn, turns
Bad Blood into a mini-action film, with Taylor leaping into an office and dueling with baddies.
Hoping for a theme of women's empowerment, she enlists as her co-heroines a number of female stars ranging from model Cindy Crawford to actresses Zendaya and Selena Gomez to Lena Dunham, the creator of the dark television comedy series
Girls.
Lena wrote on Twitter ahead of the video's debut:
Taylor in the video turns into a boxer and, with her hair momentarily dyed deep red, struts with a row of weapon-clinging women.
After premiering the video, Taylor opened the televised awards by introducing rock veterans Van Halen, who performed their hard-charging 1984 hit
Panama.
The singer later accepted an award and embraced Scottish DJ Calvin Harris, who was sitting beside her, in images certain to reinforce gossip that the two are dating.
The Billboard Music Awards, run by the music trade magazine, recognize chart performance unlike the more prestigious Grammys which are based on voting within the industry.