The Katy Perry Challenge: Say Something Nice About the 'Swish Swish' Video

By Rich Juzwiak | August 24, 2017 | 3:05pm

Entertainment

Because Katy Perry’s aesthetic for this album cycle is doing way too much yet, at the same time, not quite enough, her just-released video for “Swish Swish” is the perfect Witness-era artifact. Bowing almost four months after the flop single arrived DOA, the slapstick “Swish Swish” doesn’t perpetuate bad blood with Taylor Swift (about all “Swish Swish” has in common with the “Bad Blood” clip is that it also portrays a crew). Instead, it focuses on a plot about a basketball game-turned-professional wrestling match—it literalizes the song’s metaphor so as to dumb down a track that was not at all smart in the first place.

What else? There is so much! (It’s six-and-a-half minutes long!) “Swish Swish” features Katy frequently mugging into the camera to remind us that though she may be woke now, she is still wacky at heart. There’s Terry Crews, there’s a Stranger Things kid, there’s an eating vlogger. There’s Nicki Minaj delivering one of her very worst verses in a scene that appears to have been shot on a day that Katy wasn’t on set? There’s a drone shot.