'1989'

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With her next effort, Swift seemed to step further away from her country music roots. She released 1989 in October 2014. "Shake It Off" proved to be one of the catchiest tracks of the year, reaching the top of the pop charts, and she immediately followed with a second chart-topping single, "Blank Space." In an age of low album sales, 1989 moved more than 1.2 million copies in its first week, making Swift the first artist to top the 1 million mark in opening-week sales for three albums.

Swift continued to play with her public persona with the track "Bad Blood," which features Kendrick Lamar . In the video for the song, which debuted at the 2015 Billboard Music Awards and doubles as a noir action short, she appears as a tough, cutthroat character called "Catastrophe." Swift recruited other celebrities to appear in the video as well, including Karlie Kloss, Cindy crowford and Lena Dunham. 

In February 2016, Swift opened up the 58th Annual Grammy Awards with another track from 1989, "Out of the Woods." Having received pre-telecast awards for Best Music Video and Best Pop Vocal Album, later in the evening, Swift won another Grammy for Album of the Year, making music history as the first woman to win the award twice. 

In what was seen as a sharp rebuke to a new West song in which he took credit for her fame, Swift used her acceptance speech to issue an empowerment statement. "I wanna say to all the young women out there, there are going to be people along the way who will try to undercut your success or take credit for your accomplishments or your fame," she said. "But if you just focus on the work, and you don't let those people sidetrack you, someday when you get where you're going, you’ll look around and you will know that it was you and the people who loved you who put you there. And that will be the greatest feeling in the world."

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