Taylor Swift’s star-studded music video Bad Blood debuts

SINGAPORE — After weeks of anticipation, singer-songwriter Taylor Swift debuted her star-studded music video for her new single, Bad Blood, at the 2015 Billboard Music Awards yesterday (May 17).

Featuring 18 celebrities, including Selena Gomez, Karlie Kloss, Jessica Alba, Lena Dunham and Cindy Crawford, the music video starts off with Swift and Gomez fighting a group of masked men in an office. Swift, who plays the character Catastrophe, is then betrayed by Gomez, known as Arsyn in the clip. Undeterred, Swift heads into training and the clip ends off in a showdown between Swift and Gomez, each with their team of allies.

The video, which includes two new verses by Kendrick Lamar, is directed by Joseph Kahn, who also directed Swift’s music video for Blank Space. Kahn took to Twitter to express his love for working with Swift, saying “she is the bomb”.

The 1989 track, long rumoured to be about a feud between Swift and singer Katy Perry, has also has its own emoji — making Swift the first celebrity to get a custom Twitter hashflag, reported The Next Web. When users tweet with the hashtag #BadBloodMusicVideo, a custom emoji of a bandaid with a bullet hole through it shows up. It refers to the song’s lyric “band-aids don’t fix bullet holes”.

Before the music video debuted, Swift teased fans with Sin City-like posters of each of the stars with their character names on her Instagram account.