Did "Bad Blood" Reference Katy Perry?

On Sunday night, at the Billboard Music Awards, the world finally got to see the highly-anticipated Taylor Swift "Bad Blood" music video premiere, which had captivated us all due to the sheer amount of awesomeness (and celebrity guest cameos) it seemed to contain. The video definitely lived up to all that it promised, packing as many of Swift's friends and acquaintances into one, gigantic series of movie references, all tied together into a cohesive plot: Swift as Catastrophe getting revenge on Selena Gomez as Arsyn for betraying her during a heist. However, "Bad Blood" was originally written about Katy Perry — allegedly — in response to what is rumored to be Perry's theft of Swift's backup dancers on a tour. Did the "Bad Blood" music video reference Katy Perry in any way?

The answer to that is no, not really. With how much promotion Swift was doing for the music video, you would have thought that this video would end up being a three minute excuse to make as many thinly veiled references to Perry as humanly possible. However, as Swift herself said in an interview with The Telegraph after the release of "Bad Blood," "I'm not giving them anything to write about. I'm never going to talk about her in my interview. It's not going to happen." It appears that she's also never going to talk about her in her music videos, because "Bad Blood" doesn't even symbolically make mention of Perry at any point.

This makes perfect sense for two reasons. First of all, many of Swift's celebrity friends who feature in the video are also friends — or at least not themselves on bad terms with — Perry, so it's unlikely that they would want to feature in a music video that outright lambasted her, even if it was on Swift's behalf. Second of all, Swift has moved far beyond the point where she is airing her dirty laundry in the media. It was the digging of reporters that managed to find out about the Swift and Perry feud and, while Swift has hardly denied that Perry is not one of her favorite people, that's a completely different level from shooting a high-profile revenge videos where she's practicing her ninja star throwing on a thousand Katy Perry posters, you know?

In that sense, it's an incredibly good thing that Swift did not descend to the level of blowing up radios playing Perry songs or having Gomez-slash-Arsyn dress up as Perry to make sure that the audience at home knows exactly where Swift's bad blood really lies. That allowed everyone to focus on the video for what it is — an epic masterpiece that should totally be a movie or a TV show, or at least have a 14 minute director's cut that shows a more full story of what is going on in this unfiltered greatness. Instead of combing through the video for clues that Swift is still really, really super mad at Perry, and got a bunch of her friends together to take Perry out, we are able to buy into the fantasy world that Swift has created and root for, well, everyone.

In other words, let's let this feud die and enjoy the "Bad Blood" music video without picking sides in that mess. Check out the video again below.

Image: YouTube (2)