In a live stream event hosted on the still somehow semi-relevant Yahoo! on August 18th, Taylor Swift announced to her fans and the rest of the world that after two long, lonely years, she was finally putting out a new album this fall.

The key point in this announcement was not that the hiatus was finally over, but that, like the inevitable metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly, Taylor Swift was giving America a true pop album. Taylor Swift is no longer country; Taylor Swift is no longer crossover country; Taylor Swift is definitively pop. And with this realignment, Swift will have to assume all the baggage that comes with it.

Screenshot courtesy of YouTube

America’s favorite sweetheart that still acts like she’s anything but 22 dished out a few details about her album, which will be titled 1989, an allusion to her birth year. People who still buy physical CDs will be treated with copies of the Polaroids Swift used to create the album artwork. Additionally, because Swift is smart and knows that music is as much a business these days as it is an art, a deluxe version of the record will be released and will feature raw cuts of Swift in the songwriting process, recorded directly from what I assume is the iPhone she Instagrams from.

Aside from that, Swift of course offered the main treat of a new music video that comes with one of the tracks of the album, “Shake It Off”.

Taylor Swift should not be divisive. She makes the type of non-controversial music that Kidz Bop doesn’t have to change the lyrics to.

As far “Shake It Off” goes, though, it’s a C+ pop song with a catchy hook and a few horns. Thematically, it’s about as unoriginal as the fourth incarnation of CSI. Swift can be clever; “Shake It Off” is not clever. Seriously, there are better songs about not caring about what people think, some of them even having the same title.

But, again, Taylor Swift is now officially pop, so this should be the new normal. In addition to being lyrically unchallenging, we also get cultural appropriation. Remember: pop music thrives on being as formulaic as possible. People like patterns. Naturally then, Swift includes in her shaking themed video caricatures of what she—or someone who had the idea—thought would be stereotypical dance styles.

For three and a half minutes, viewers can watch Taylor Swift take a stab at ballet, contemporary dance, break dancing, crunk dancing, cheerleading, ribbon twirling, and twerking. Being Taylor Swift, she must perform each and every move with a hint of awkward cuteness only she could still get away with. But it’s that last style of dance that is problematic.

Flashback to almost a year ago when society decided to have a discussion about Miley Cyrus’s use of black female dancers to twerk in her “We Can’t Stop” video and on stage with her at the VMAs. It was one thing—i.e. not specifically wrong—for Cyrus to use an all-black crew for backup dancers. It’s another thing though when these dancers become faceless props performing a dance that is normally attributed to a minority culture.

Swift, who perfectly crafts her image all too well (you can hate me for that joke), doesn’t seem too apt at learning lessons about cultural appropriation. See in the video, in case you didn’t watch, every dance group gets a bit of face-time with they’re actual faces shown, that is except for the dancers that twerk, many of whom are black.

Now to be fair, one of the twerkers, a white woman, gets a second and a half shot of her face, but other than that it’s just Taylor Swift either twerking in front of other twerkers or Taylor Swift crawling between the legs of twerkers.

Screenshot courtesy of YouTube

I could devote a whole other article to the differences between cultural exchange and cultural appropriation, but for the sake of being brief, the line separating the two is a fuzzy one. Just remember that cultural exchanges are voluntary; cultural appropriation is not. In the case of “Shake It Off”, Taylor Swift can get away with twerking because she looks adorable doing it. Take out her presence though, and it becomes what people believe to be stereotypical black dancing.

Whether or not there ends up being actual backlash against Swift is yet to be seen. If it does come, well, I can assume Taylor knows exactly what to do with the criticism. Regardless, we’re going to have to get used to the new normal that is just pop Taylor Swift, complete with even more sing-talking in her music.

1989 arrives on the market October 27^th.