Taylor Swift Braves The Bullies In "Mean" Video

Taylor Swift just released her brand new music video for her up-beat song "Mean." The song contains heavy elements of fiddles and banjos, with critics saying that it was the most country song on her latest third album,"Speak Now." Although "Mean," brilliantly calls out someone who cruelly points out her flaws, the Grammy-winning superstar wrote the song to get back at her critics: "Some days I'm fine and I can just brush it off and go about my day, but some days it absolutely levels me. All I can do is continue to try to work hard every single day and feel everything. I think it's important to feel things because I then write songs about that."
"The whole idea of being criticized and the fact that that entered my life made for a song that I'm very proud of on the record called 'Mean,'" Swift continues. "There's always going to be someone who's just mean to you. Dealing with that is all you can control about that situation, how you handle it. 'Mean' is about how I handle it, and sort of my mind set about this whole situation." This twangy track finds the young country songstress taking aim at her critics, and in the video, we find Swift in all her glory as a damsel in distress.
Declan Whitebloom directed, while Swift herself drew up the concept, the new video was shot over two days in Los Angeles, with the Orpheum Theatre serving as its backdrop. It opens with Swift and her band in the theater. She plays the banjo, and they're all dressed in vintage-inspired clothes and the stage is set up like a front yard of a farmhouse. The video cuts to a boy reading a fashion magazine in a locker room being bullied by the football team, and is then back on that stage, where Swift is dressed in a little white '20s-style dress and is being tied to the tracks by an old-timey villain.
But Swift and the others are hardly the only victims in the clip. Viewers are back in modern time, where a girl, wearing a fast-food uniform, is being made fun of by her peers. Another girl is being teased in school and can't sit with "the cool girls" at lunch and is forced to eat in the school bathroom. All the while, Swift is plucking away at her banjo. Her words are empowering the young people affected by their bullies. The 21-year-old's new video for "Mean" is the latest entry in an avalanche of empowering clips, which we've seen from artists like Katy Perry ("Firework") and Pink ("Raise Your Glass").