Being a backup dancer looks like a pretty sweet job: You get to tour the world with a bunch of mates, performing to sellout crowds at stellar venues, all without the intense scrutiny placed on the actual popstar (unless you’re Katy Perry’s Left Shark).
There are some backup dancers, however, that don’t get to have all the fun. Taylor Swift’s backup dancers do not get to dance to music. In a just released behind-the-scenes video for End Game, she discusses shooting “the pub scene.” She commends her dancers “because they’ve been pretending like there’s music playing when there’s not,” continuing, “They’ve been dancing to a click track. It’s incredibly hard work.” Imagine trying to twerk to the sparse click of a metronome. Yah.
It’s not a surprising move — the singer is notoriously secretive about her music. A 2014 interview with Rolling Stone (coinciding with 1989’s release) captured the significant angst she gets around technology. “Don’t even get me started on wiretaps,” she says, “It’s not a good thing for me to talk about socially. I freak out.” Pondering who may be spying in on that particular chat, she (kind of jokingly, probably very seriously) says, “The janitor who’s being paid by TMZ. This is gonna sound like I’m a crazy person – but we don’t even know. I have to stop myself from thinking about how many aspects of technology I don’t understand.”
While it’d be easy to make cheap joke about Taylor being a major buzzkill at the pub, her paranoia isn’t unwarranted — both 1989 and Reputation were leaked before their release. And given the multitude of Black Mirror-induced about how our phones are probably definitely listening in on us, it’s hard to rail against Taylor for being overly paranoid.