This hater’s gonna hate but Swift can shake it off
To channel a little righteous Henry Miller-
This is not an essay. This is libel, slander, defamation of character of all who stand for the demolition of truth. This is not a essay, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of commodified culture, a kick in the pants to capitalism, western civilization, cults, mendacity in all its forms. . . what you will. This is a needed wallowing in obscene contempt for artless art, where profits are valued over truth.
I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over the dirty rotting corpse that is Taylor Swift’s public image. Only a culture in such a low state could be attracted to the putrescence that flubs out of the hole in her pretty face.
Swift is representative of pop culture porn. There’s nothing hidden here.
The vapid thing you see is the vapid thing you get.
Porn is porn because it strips out all the other stuff that might give it emotional weight. Removes all meaning from the act. Provides the thinnest of contrivances for what is happening or what is meant. They just get to it.
For an action film the porn version would be people firing guns at each other for an hour and a half with no explanation. Ecks vs Sever perhaps. The less subtext for the content the more the piece is divorced from nuanced reality.
That’s what Swift’s music is like. It just gets right to a candy pop vibe and jacks off right in your face. No introduction, no layered meaning. She thrives and perpetuates the cult of me-ism. It oozes right out of that fecal matter she calls her music.
Swift represents a crystalizing of the Disneyfication of music. A symbolic victory for all corporations who can throw a parade celebrating the total commodification over the American mind. What pop divas like Madonna, Beyonce, Britney, Lady Gaga and Miley started, Taylor is putting an end cap on. Spiking the moron football into the ground and doing a touchdown dance.
The lyrics of a large percentage of pop music are wretched. Deeply ego based talking about who did them wrong and how they are strong, gonna rise above it all, yeah yeah yeahhhhh. The kinda music you resonate with when you’re barely conscious or have fallen so out of touch with emotional truth you’ll let yourself be hypnotized by any spell that offers a temporary high.
An ongoing theme in Swift’s work is about some drama in her personal life or a thinly veiled boast. She’ll talk down to all the haters and tell them all how it is since naturally her life experiences social climbing have filled her with such wisdom. She is the central topic throughout the majority of her music. Her lyrics like so many other trite dimwitted pop songs focus a lot on looks and materialism and desires that never quite pan out when you actually get what you were pining for the whole time.
Let’s briefly examine her song Blank Space:
“New money, suit and tie
I can read you like a magazine…
Grab your passport and my hand
I can make the bad guys good for a weekend…
Cherry lips, crystal skies
I could show you incredible things
Stolen kisses, pretty lies”
Real heady stuff goin’ on here. She’s a flirtin’ with a newly rich guy. How EXCITING! I’m dying to see how this one ends. I’m gonna guess probably with sex and riveting material for a new song. Who can’t relate to meeting attractive rich people and some globetrotting? The song reads like a two bit romance novel.
But in the hands of modern day marketing machines this song generated an enormous amount of revenue and was a number one hit. It’s crap on a stick. But it sells. The more emotionally stupid the-powers-that-be can keep the masses the more stuff like this will be popular.
If Swift’s music had a small audience you would not be seeing these words. Even if I had casual exposure to it I wouldn’t hold much of a commentary, just dismissal like I’d dismiss elevator music. It’s because there’s a culture of fools who legitimize her and try to prop up mediocrity as greatness that I have a commentary.
You might say this essay stinks of artistic elitism, or that it just stinks. However, my take is that this is a rebuttal to a culture of suck. A rebuke of the slide into idiocracy.
People resonate with aesthetics that match their emotional disposition. If you find you resonate with Swift’s music you should examine what that means. You fall for cheap stupid words that sound nice if left completely unexamined. Things that are conditionally true at best but almost entirely work as a salve for the ego in a niche of disingenuous culture.
Though I admit it myself, that shake it off song is a catchy ditty. How much she actually had to do with that in the final outcome that rolled out of the studio, I have my doubts, though that can be said for the majority of pop entertainers. But the lyrics are juvenile, so I assume she at least is responsible for that. If she’s really responsible for the catchiness, then well done. She’s at least qualified to make advertisements, which is the genre her catalog of capitalist jingles belongs, as consumer-tainment.
Swift’s bubbly music says “I am Karen. Hear me roar!”
Popcorn feminism. McBeliefs. A collection of lyrical cliches encased in candy coated melodies with a soupçon of look-how-diverse-I-am commercial hip hop accompaniments. Finely crafted mainstream blather. Though I don’t want to just castigate the Swifties here, most mainstream rap, heavy metal, and country music are putrid in their own unique ways.
I need not tell most of you that most pop music isn’t art, though it’s on a spectrum. There’s Brittany Spears and Taylor Swift. Then there is Phil Collins and Sarah McLachlan, who at times have more substantial offerings. On the Swifty side of the pop spectrum it’s produced entirely for commodification. It’s closer to propaganda than art. Conformity enforcement with a beat.
It’s so acceptable it can be played at any corporate event. So derivative it wallows in cliches and then pretends it’s edgy. It’s doesn’t challenge the intellect, heart, or the spirit. It’s simply selling egocentric platitudes people want to believe about themselves with a catchy chorus, which is primarily what makes all pop songs addictive.
Swift is an inspiration to the ego of every would-be and former debutante. But we’ve actually never met Taylor Swift, I don’t think she has either. We’ve only met an eminence front. It’s a put on.
Her music is on the same banal level as other mega pop stars of our age. What I’ve noticed has happened is where before while there was still this pop music of this kind coming out, but there would be a lot of more emotionally mature music that was more getting attention as well.
Now we live in an era where the the stuff that’s more substantial is difficult to find and only a cacophony of the superficial can be heard. It may not be by accident or simply the preference of the masses either. Everyone knows there’s a power in music that can fuel social movements. And a bulk of the entertainment industry has always been corrupt and influenced by mafia, corporations, government regulatory controls, intelligence agencies making suggestions, or keeping tabs on groups who might drum up opposition.
The powers that be love Swift. She stands for nothing that veers from the status quo line of the powerful. Why would she? She’s one of them now. Another elite with an embarrassing amount of wealth no one person on earth should command.
In the end, believe it or not, I hold no enmity towards Swift. I’m sure she has many fine latent qualities behind the avatar of the sell-out she presents to the world. She’s not to blame for her popularity. This society is, a dominator society that needs selfish nihilistic consumerism to dominate the brain in order for it to continue its imperialistic march. This writing is only making an example of Swift because she’s the lead sellout. However this also about us on a societal level and coming to a realization that the majority of us are not grounded in reality or in touch with deeper emotional parts of ourselves. We blind ourselves with cheap art and distractions that provide simplistic comfort to sweep the dust under the rug. We all do it and it’s slowly killing us; slowly widening the gap of human disconnection in our own being and with others.
People may shrug at this angry middle aged man shouting at clouds. “What’s the harm?” Or “You need to calm down.” Such notions dismiss the rolling snowball of lies compiling in the background and pretending like emotional truth is unimportant.
