Member Since: 9/1/2012
Posts: 13,195
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Quote:
There’s an odd hypocrisy to the song and video as a package. The music video and the song’s lyrics are all about breaking the rules unapologetically, if that’s what you have to do to be your best self. They echo what Swift’s music has pretty much always preached: who cares what’s normal or what other people think—you can only truly be fabulous if you embrace your individuality. Anyone who thinks otherwise, to employ the emotional sophistication of “Shake It Off,” can suck it.
The dance-heavy music video echoes those themes. A tutu clad Swift refuses to pirouette with her fellow ballerinas, preferring to pelvic thrust like a rebel instead. Beautiful contemporary dancers are making elegant shapes with ribbons; Swift tosses hers in the air and doesn’t even bother to catch it. March to the beat of your own drummer, she’s saying, but don’t even bother to dance on the beat.
How confusing, then, that “Shake It Off” musically represents, after years of inching towards it, Taylor Swift’s arrival as a run-of-the-mill, straight-and-narrow pop artist. The reason Swift’s music always felt a little bit special was because it was a little bit country, a little bit folksy, a little bit barebones and lyrical and young and meaningful and all those things that those industry-manufactured singing (or at least lip-synching) sexbombs weren’t. Swift’s music was never conventionally radio friendly in today’s over-produced, techno-bombastic era, which is in part what made Swift such a radio hit. She was a breath of fresh air, raw and genuine and sometimes even a little bit off key.
“Shake It Off,” even by Swift’s own admission, is a marked departure from all of that in pursuit of a pure pop sound. Her most recent album, the critically heralded and seriously great RED, certainly had its fair share of pop influence, particularly on tracks like “I Knew You Were Trouble” and “We Are Never Getting Back Together,” but the record as a whole was always built as—and felt like—a blending of Swift’s signature country-pop sound with the modern-pop influences that a girl her age would naturally be enjoying and, you know, influenced by. But having your sound influenced by a genre and abandoning your sound completely are two different things.
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...ppointing.html
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I can't believe Europe is finally accepting her. This is her first iTunes #1 in those 3 countries.