Hello and welcome to my first weekly post now that I have an actual schedule! By the way, if you haven't already, I recommend that you check the page above titled "My Posting Schedule", which has all the details for how I'll manage my blog posting. And if for some reason you don't want to look at that, I also have a slightly more basic outline of the schedule in my "secret post" from the 13th day of Christmas (which, unsurprisingly, I think most of you found).
Before you ask, no, not all of my weekly posts will be this big. I just wanted to make this one special because it's the first one. So, I'll be ranking all of Taylor Swift's music videos. Yep, literally all of them, including collaborations with other artists, officially released concert videos, and the many compilation videos. (The Best Day is just counted as one video even though she remade it with Fearless TV.) At first I thought there were just a few, but I found out there are actually 64 of them. They've changed a lot over time, and some are definitely better than others.
Please note that this is ranked based on how much I like the VIDEOS. Some of these are songs I genuinely can't stand but have awesome videos, and some of these are songs I absolutely love but have boring videos. This is purely based on the visuals, and I tried to avoid being biased by how much I like each song. Also, this will update whenever Taylor releases new music videos, so I've linked this in the list of pages at the top of the blog so you can come back to it to see how I rank Taylor's new videos. (Imagine she surprise drops a video for So High School tomorrow...) Anyway, without further ado, let's get into it.
#64: I Don't Wanna Live Forever (with Zayn) 🤕 - Thanks for destroying my vision. My eyes don't seem to be able to handle a video that looks like... whatever this is.
#63: Should've Said No 🎞️ - Such a missed opportunity to make an actual deep music video reflecting the complex story of the song, when this is literally just a straight-up concert performance with nothing else to it.
#62: The Last Time (with Gary Lightbody) 🎤 - Another story-less concert video. I like the song and red aesthetic better than SSN so I guess it gets some extra points for that.
#61: Beautiful Eyes 👁️ - This is a cute and underrated song with a video that I truly believed for a year was a fan-made compilation. This could've had an awesome romantic video like You Belong With Me, but instead it has this. Also, I think a video for I Heart ? would've been fire.
#60: New Romantics 🏙️ - My least favorite of the five "tour compilation" videos. I actually quite like the concept of these, but this video isn't hitting it for me as there's not much beyond the song which is already pretty mediocre on its own.
#59: Change 💃 - If you exclude collabs, concerts, and compilations (aka the 3 Cs) then this is my least favorite Taylor video. Three minutes of Taylor awkwardly dancing around her band and nearly falling over 1,234,567,890,987,654,321 times.
#58: White Horse 𐂃 - Well, this is the first music video on this ranking that at least feels like a "proper music video" with a story and everything. (Change isn't technically considered a performance video but it might as well be.) I love this song, but I hate how this video misrepresents the actually very profound theme behind the lyrics of the song as just being a generic breakup story, with over half of the video being the same scene of Taylor crying in the corner of a room.
#57: Tim McGraw 💚 - Her first song and her first music video. It's quite obvious that Taylor was on a low budget when she made it, which unfortunately resulted in a lot of awkward camera movement and some unusual shots.
#56: Two Is Better Than One (with Boys Like Girls) 2️⃣ - Anyone else know this exists?
#55: Highway Don't Care (with Tim McGraw & Keith Urban) 🛣️ - Like I said for the last one.
#54: I'm Only Me When I'm With You 🧑🤝🧑 - This compilation thing would seem like a cooler idea if she only did it for one song rather than four.
#53: The Best Day 👨👩👦 - Again, this doesn't really work as well as it should when it's so similar to other videos. Love this song though.
#52: Christmas Tree Farm 🎄 - The last of the compilations. I would've much rather had a music video for Christmases When You Were Mine, a shiny golden ornament that does not deserve to be at the back of the tree.
#51: Mean 🪕 - Yeehaw?
#50: Red ❤️ - A pretty generic performance video.
#49: Sparks Fly⚡ - Drop everything now. Meet me in the pouring rain. Make a better video for this fire song and take away the pain. Yeah, I'm kinda kidding, this video actually has some nice moments from the Speak Now tour but overall there's not much to it.
#48: Fifteen 🏫- Uhhhhh why is there a school in the middle of the forest?
#47: Back To December ❄️ - Taylor crying, her ex-boyfriend wandering through snow, a decent country ballad playing in the background, and... that's it.
#46: Both Of Us (with B.o.B.) 💨 - Why do three of her four "Speak Red" country collab videos have basically the same setting? I do like this one significantly more than the previous two though. (Also, yes, I came up with the term "Speak Red" to refer to the five non-album songs she released between and surrounding Speak Now & Red, i.e. this song, Highway Don't Care, Two Is Better Than One, Half Of My Heart, and Crazier.)
#45: Half Of My Heart (with John Mayer) 💔- And speaking of Speak Red, this is the one Speak Red video that's not in that green foresty country plain setting we saw in the last three. (I don't know how to describe it.) I wasn't sure whether to even include this in the ranking because of how little Taylor contributed to this, but I did anyway because I'm including EVERYTHING.
#44: Fearless 💛 - I actually really enjoy what Taylor did with her first video and her first major tour. From the circle at the beginning to the iconic number 13 to the chair scene to the rain performance... it's just so fearless. But then again, it's just a tour video.
#43: I Can Do It With A Broken Heart 🩶 - Unsurprisingly Taylor's best tour compilation video was her most recent one, giving an intriguing behind-the-scenes look at the Eras Tour.
#42: Crazier 😍 - The best Speak Red video. A generic but sweet little romantic video for an obscure Hannah Montana song.
#41: Shake It Off 🫨 - I didn't really know where else to put this.
#40: Picture To Burn 🖼️ - This is actually my least favorite Taylor Swift song. I love Taylor, but I find this song unlistenable. But the video is actually kinda cool especially considering she was still just getting started when she released this. I might've psychologically enjoyed this more if it was a song I actually liked, like Better Than Revenge or maybe Should've Said No.
#39: Mine 💜 - Not her most interesting work but it's got a cute story and I like the scenes of the forest of photographs. The repetitive scenes of the little girl watching her parents fight seems so obviously like a mistake though. There's no way they actually wanted the exact same scene three times in this video, right?
#38: Ours 💼 - The Office? Is that you? I don't quite understand it, but I guess I kinda enjoy it. (Yikes, Speak Now wasn't a great era of cinematography. We're still in the bottom half of the ranking and we've already seen five out of the seven Speak Now videos along with all five of the Speak Red videos. Missed opportunity for an Enchanted or Haunted video. The last two are pretty high though.)
#37: Our Song🌻- Flowers. Flowers. And more flowers. Everywhere.
#36: Everything Has Changed (with Ed Sheeran) 🤗 - The concept of a young Tay & Ed is really cool to me, but it's not a super interesting video otherwise.
#35: ...Ready For It? 🖤 - I know the Swifties are gonna kill me for ranking this so low, but this is still a good video. Most of her videos are good. I love the song and this video has some cool Easter eggs, but it feels a bit generic to me. (There's a black heart emoji there, sorry if it's not very visible.)
#34: End Game (with Ed Sheeran & Future) 🚢 - There's not much story, but the lighting and setting changes are really cool and the flashing lights don't get in the way here.
#33: Lavender Haze 🔮 - My least favorite song on Midnights, but I love the purple aesthetic here so I don't care that much. It was obvious foreshadowing for Speak Now TV, but not quite as obvious as Bejeweled.
#32: Teardrops On My Guitar 🎸 - This video is kinda cute. Oh wait... let me check something... can this be so? We've already got our first era completely knocked out! All five music videos from Taylor Swift's self-titled debut album have been eliminated within the first half of the ranking. Not surprised her earliest era of videos was the most failed.
#31: 22 🎉 - I don't know about you... but I wish I could rank this exactly nine spots higher.
#30: Delicate 👗 - I can never tell whether I'm absolutely obsessed with this video or despise it, but it's hilarious either way.
#29: The Joker & The Queen (with Ed Sheeran) 🃏 - Awesome how they cast the original Tay & Ed actors from Everything Has Changed to play the characters in this teen romance story. If you don't count Safe & Sound which was included in the More Red chapter, this is the highest-ranked non-album music video on this ranking.
#28: Me! (with Brendon Urie) 🪅 - Imagine if Taylor's album announcements were actually those massive algebraic equations people keep making up. If you're one of those Swifties, may I ask you, do you remember how Taylor announced the title of Lover? Oh right, through a bright pink billboard in this music video. This music video is so colorful and it's... certainly something.
#27: We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together📱 - The animal costumes are a bit much. I like it.
#26: Karma (with Ice Spice) 🪐 - I don't know why they used the Ice Spice remix instead of the original for this video, but I'll take it.
#25: Bejeweled 💎 - It was quite obvious which Taylor's Version album was coming next after this video. I mean, one of the guest stars literally says "speak not" at the beginning... yeah, we know how to change one letter. It's a pretty cool video though.
#24: Safe & Sound (with Civil Wars) 🐦 - Hunger Games songs are almost always great, and apparently so are Hunger Games music videos. A video for Eyes Open would've been so iconic though. This means that technically every music video for a non-album single has now been eliminated.
#23: Better Man (with Little Big Town) 🥺 - Call me crazy for putting this random obscure collab video so high, but I love the aesthetic and story here so much.
#22: Babe (with Sugarland) 🚿 - This video is so awesome. It definitely feels like a Taylor video even though she's not the main artist here. Also, look where this is ranked. I don't know about you...
#21: Love Story 🏰 - This video and song both have such a great story to them, and they're clearly connected but not to the point of feeling like the video adds nothing.
#20: Begin Again ☕ - A Wednesday in a cafe that happens to be in Paris. I don't know how it gets better than this. (But, well, it does.)
#19: Fortnight (with Post Malone) 📅 - The black and white aesthetic here is really cool, and the Easter eggs here are well-done without taking away from the storytelling. Now, exactly 13 videos after the last time this happened, The Tortured Poets Department becomes the second era to be fully eliminated. Interestingly, that means we've had the first album and the most recent album be the first two eliminated.
#18: Look What You Made Me Do 🐍 - As much as this song refuses to grow on me, this video has grown on me a lot since I first saw it. This starts like a straight-up horror movie and then we see an absolutely savage side of Taylor... it's interesting and I see why people love it. Reputation now becomes the third era to have all of its videos eliminated.
#17: I Bet You Think About Me (with Chris Stapleton) 🎂 - This FTV video manages to be funny, chaotic, romantic, angry, and extremely RED! Also, this is the highest-ranked collab video on the ranking, so congratulations to Chris Stapleton!
#16: The Man 👨🏻💼 - This video gave us the iconic Mr. Swift, a very creative and almost scary transition for Tay. Also, KARMA.
#15: You Need To Calm Down 🌈 - The many cameos here were so iconic, especially the Katy Perry moment at the end.
#14: Bad Blood 🔥 - The emoji says it all.
#13: I Can See You 🕶️ - Lucky number 13, and our first appearance on the ranking from Speak Now in a while, even though this is technically a FTV video. The concept about reclaiming her eras is really well-done. Also, I know it's on the nose, but I think it's cool how the time at the beginning said July 9th at 1:58 AM.
#12: Blank Space 🩵 - InsaniTAY at her best.
#11: Style 🪟 - Am I the only person who actually loves this video significantly more than the actual song? The visuals are not boring at all. They are extremely well-made and beautiful.
#10: You Belong With Me 🪧 - Perhaps Taylor's most "iconic" video. Fearless is now the fourth era eliminated from the rankdown, which means we still have about one song from each era left.
#9: Out Of The Woods 🌵 - Although I still believe that 1989 is a bit overrated as an album, there are SO MANY 1989 videos near the top. This video is one of Taylor's most aesthetically intriguing.
#8: The Story Of Us 📓 - The library aesthetic and the early insaniTAY moments make for an incredibly underrated video. Speak Now is now the fifth era eliminated.
#7: Antihero 👻 - A funny yet well-crafted self-deprecating music video that pairs well with the song. With Midnights being the sixth era eliminated, we are now officially past halfway through every era.
#6: I Knew You Were Trouble 🌄 - I love this video possibly more than I should. It's just got such a cool-looking setting and contrast between the desert and club scenes.
#5: Cardigan 🤍 - Only one video from Folklore & Evermore was not enough, but I guess that makes sense with COVID. This video must have been so hard to make! Since this is the only video from it, Folklore is now the seventh era eliminated.
#4: Willow 🤎 - Bewitching. Haunting. Powerful. All filmed during the pandemic. Once again, there's only one video from this era, so it's the eighth one eliminated.
#3: Lover 🩷 - Oh my gosh, the colors. The way each room represents an era and has a distinct storyline while still keeping it in one cohesive romantic plot, all inside of a snowglobe... wow. I love this, again, possibly more than I should. Lover is the ninth era eliminated, which means we have just two eras left in the ranking.
#2: Wildest Dreams 🦒 - These last two videos are just absolutely stellar. This video is so cinematic. I know it was "problematic" and all, but it's beautiful nonetheless. The outfits, the animals, the setting, from the desert to the camera scene in the city, all while having such a profoundly told story. Taylor has been a mastermind since 1989. Alright, that means 1989 is the penultimate era to be eliminated from the ranking. What's number one? I think you all know...
#1: All Too Well 🧣 - I mean, what else would it be? You all know I love this song, and making the ten-minute version into a full-blown short film was so impressive. I love that the video reflects on the themes of the song without seeming like a complete visual rework of the lyrics, and the way the song plays throughout is cleverly done. Taylor could totally direct a movie. This means that Red is the eleventh and final era eliminated. Red is just a masterpiece all around, period.
Whew... that took a while. Thanks for reading my first weekly post and my first rankdown! That's all for now! Byeeeeeeeeee!
