Los Angeles (AFP) – Pop superstar Taylor Swift showed a new dark, bad-girl image as she premiered her latest video Sunday during the MTV Video Music Awards.
The video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” a dance track that quickly topped streaming charts after its release Friday, opens with imagery of a cemetery.
The camera zooms to a grave that says “Here Lies Taylor Swift’s Reputation” — a theme that will apparently weigh heavily on Swift’s newly announced album, which is entitled “Reputation” and comes out on November 10.
The video proceeds to show Swift in Halloween-like makeup and then crashing a car, with paparazzi quickly appearing to show her mishap to the world.
The 27-year-old singer, usually known for her squeaky-clean image, appears in the video smashing up a store with a baseball bat and riding on top of a motorcycle in a spiked leather jacket.
Swift heads into more expected territory as she leads a troupe of dancers to the house beat of the chorus to “Look What You Made Me Do.”
When Swift released the song, fans immediately speculated that she was taking aim at the rapper Kanye West.
He outraged Swift with a song last year in which he boasted that he may be able to get her to bed because “I made that bitch famous” — an apparent reference to how he interrupted her acceptance speech at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2009.
Swift reinforced the fans’ theory on the song’s meaning by ending the video saying she would “very much like to be excluded from this narrative” — a turn of phrase that she previously used to describe the feud with West.
Swift’s last album, “1989,” was one of the top-selling works of the past decade.