Years ago when Jeff Tweedy was just getting started in his band Uncle Tupelo he met Rick Danko from The Band after a show, who gave him some insight and advice:
"'You sound desperate. You should always sound desperate. Don't lose that,'" Tweedy recalled him saying. "It's a weird way of saying something that I totally agree with. I think what he meant is people have to hear that you care — not that you're desperate in your life, but that you're desperate to communicate, desperate to connect. That's why we sing."
And that pretty much encapsulates why I hate Taylor Swift, as well as most pop music, and certainly almost all pop music of the past 25 years.
Swift, and her pop music ilk, sound desperate to be adored. They sound desperate for fame and fortune. But their music does not sound desperate in the sense that they have something inside of them which will explode if they do not get it out. The desperation is related to their identity and success, not the their experiences and emotions. It is desperation of desire, not of turmoil and conflict. It is mommy-approved Nerf Desperation.
Or maybe it is. Maybe they just have a very shallow well of existential anguish and dread to draw from. Maybe they are so bad at regulating their emotions in real life that they never build up steam. Maybe they are philosophical zombies with very little, to nothing, in the way of an inner world. I don't know what it is, precisely, but I know it when I hear it.
And I know that music like this song is devoid of any depth. It is desperate, but in entirely the wrong way. It is bland, toothless, risk averse and vapid. It sounds like bourgeoise product, not the sort of art that exposes the artist in the most vulnerable ways. It sounds like its packaging, not like a desperate attempt to purge something that cannot be held in any longer.
But since this is supposed to be about a specific song in particular, let me tell you why I especially hate Shake It Off - it is the talk of "haters". It reduces any criticism to feckless misanthropy. Any musician who shuns all critique by simply dismissing it as "haters hating" has closed the door to perspectives about their music (or personhood) that might help them grow. It is haughty, arrogant and infantile.
"I don't have to hear anything I don't like, because that is just haters, and anyone I deem a hater is rendered irrelevant by the mere fact that I have labeled them as a hater."
How fucking convenient for you to dismiss all criticism with one word, Taylor. How fucking convenient for your fans, arrested in their early teenage mindsets, to be able to shut down any uncomfortable perspective with a single word. How convenient and lazy and fugkn stupid. It is saying, "I am never the problem," and that attitude is the worst possible one you could ever adopt.
Besides, it is okay to hate. We should hate the shallow, vapid, corporate trash culture which dehumanizes us by reducing us to emotional and intellectual children, all for profit. That is a good use of hate. And I will not fugkn shake it off. I will rub it in, deep into the tissue of my very being, and there I will convert it into bile, and that bile I will spit in the face of polyoxiplastiastic NPCs like Taylor Swift, her peers, and her fans. Shake that off, fugkos!
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