I’m sure most of you are tired of hearing about Taylor Swift or her song “Shake It Off.” She’s pretty much everywhere and she’s going platinum (please read that in Kid Rock’s voice). I had managed not to hear this song until now, but I can now see why people love her so much. It’s infectious pop.
It also manages to sync up pretty well with the 1988 Crystal Light National Aerobic Championship. YouTuber Thomas Jung mashed the two together and created some sort of pop music monster, full of spandex, white sneakers, bad hair, and so many f*cking tube socks. It’s pretty damn special.
Elsewhere in the Swiftverse, Yahoo got an exclusive interview with the pop megastar where she opened up about her fight with Spotify. From Yahoo Music:
That leads to the streaming question. We’ve played the game of wondering whether you would have sold hundreds of thousands of fewer copies last week if the album had been available to people for free via those services. To a lot of people, you’re a hero for reinforcing that music still has a value. And then there are some people who think you’re standing in the way of progress by not giving in to the streaming model. What are your thoughts on all that?
If I had streamed the new album, it’s impossible to try to speculate what would have happened. But all I can say is that music is changing so quickly, and the landscape of the music industry itself is changing so quickly, that everything new, like Spotify, all feels to me a bit like a grand experiment. And I’m not willing to contribute my life’s work to an experiment that I don’t feel fairly compensates the writers, producers, artists, and creators of this music. And I just don’t agree with perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free. I wrote an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal this summer that basically portrayed my views on this. I try to stay really open-minded about things, because I do think it’s important to be a part of progress. But I think it’s really still up for debate whether this is actual progress, or whether this is taking the word “music” out of the music industry. Also, a lot of people were suggesting to me that I try putting new music on Spotify with “Shake It Off,” and so I was open-minded about it. I thought, “I will try this; I’ll see how it feels.” It didn’t feel right to me. I felt like I was saying to my fans, “If you create music someday, if you create a painting someday, someone can just walk into a museum, take it off the wall, rip off a corner off it, and it’s theirs now and they don’t have to pay for it.” I didn’t like the perception that it was putting forth. And so I decided to change the way I was doing things.
Well good for her. The more important that stood out for me was her reaction to Saturday Night Live’s Swiftamine ad from this week’s episode:
But you have, we know, seen this past weekend’s Saturday Night Live sketch about the anxieties that can only be cured with Swiftamine.
Oh my God. Swiftamine was amazing. My mom and dad and I were all together watching it, and we were just dying laughing. My favorite part was “Oooh, Taylor Swift, she’s always wearing, like, a 1950s bathing suit.” (via)
Of course she loved it. I’d still like to think that things took a horrible turn in the Swift household when that hit the television screen and that’s why Taylor isn’t allowed to have any more pets. Just my thought though.
(Via Yahoo Music / Thomas Jung)
