It didn’t seem possible, but Taylor Swift is getting even more Vanilla Coke. Last night, T-Swift disavowed her country roots and announced she was putting out an all-pop album, beginning with the single “Shake It Off.”
She’s not even a little bit country: she’s the dictionary definition of pop star. What can we expect from a new T-Swift album? Think the sonic version of drinking a pumpkin spice latte in Uggs while watching Sex and the City.
We saw this coming two years ago with “22.” In fact,
loving Taylor Swift and the song “22” is a large portion of BuzzFeed’s “How Basic Are You?” quiz, as is Diet Coke—for which Swift is the spokesperson! (For the uninitiated, someone who is basic is cliché, conformist and predictable without any sense of irony. Here’s a great explainer.) But Red tenuously held on to some folksy roots. That and her adorable awkwardness kept her from being Katy Perry.
Now Swift is pulling an anti-Miley Cyrus. Sure, they are both re-appropriating twerking in a way that some of their critics have said is racist. But Cyrus shakes her (less than curvy) booty to try to be rebellious. In “Shake It Off” Swift looks like she contemplates doing the same for a second and then laughs. That’s not her. She’s never going to sing about doing Molly or straddle anything naked. And she’s not going to differentiate herself with country music either.
Instead she’s naming her album 1989, in honor of the year she was born because nostalgia is pretty basic too.
During the Q&A portion of the livestream Swift said, “All of what I decide to do on albums is based on what I think you will like.”
And since her fans are tweens, they like basic things.
https://time.com/3144645/taylor-swif...n-spice-latte/