Taylor Swift took a moment from her “Look, I know famous people” tour to score a little street cred with the indie crowd by bringing Beck and Annie Clark, also known as St. Vincent, onstage at a show in Los Angeles. For this reason, and presumably this reason alone, somebody decided to mashup one of Beck’s songs with one of Swift’s.
The mashup, entitled “Bad Dreams,” melds Swift’s inescapable hit “Bad Blood” with Beck’s new song “Dreams” from his upcoming, heretofore unnamed album. The decision to mashup these particular songs is presumably as arbitrary as the decision to mashup Swift and Beck in the first place. “Bad Dreams” is a phrase that makes sense, therefore, now this is a song that exists. Life is simple, sometimes.
That being said, the songs do sort of work together. Swift’s vocals are mangled all to hell in order to make them deeper, and that takes a little getting used to, but if you weren’t aware it was Swift’s voice, you might not even notice it necessarily. Plus, “Dreams” is kind of an upbeat, catchy tune. This would have felt weirder if they had taken one of Beck’s dirges from his Grammy-winning Morning Phrase and mixed it up with a Swift song. “Bad Dreams” won’t get people as excited as Swift singing “Smelly Cat,” but the world can only hold so much enthusiasm anyway. Hopefully this isn’t the end of Swift/Beck mashups. Surely, there has to be some song from Swift’s “underdog” days that would mashup well with “Loser.”
(Via A.V. Club)
