I was out running errands the other day and noticed that just about every business that I entered played the Taylor Swift song “Shake it Off” at some point while I was there.  It is an extremely repetitive song that has the uncanny ability to burrow it’s hook into your brain so that you will embarrassingly start humming it throughout the day.  Once I caught myself doing this I starting thinking about it in relation to the texts discussions about pop music and Adorno’s conversation about how popular music promotes “passive listening” (69).

To start off this discussion I’ll clarify some things about the song for those who have not yet had the pleasure of hearing it.  “Shake it Off” is a song about how you shouldn’t pay any attention to all the mean, nasty things that people say about you and to instead, literally, just shake it off by dancing a bunch and acting silly.  Which for someone whose audience is predominately adolescent seems  fairly positive. A quick google search of Taylor Swift today gave equally noble results with a great number of articles about the singers work with child advocacy groups,  her vocal support of the LGBT community and various other charities for which she has donated her time and money.

So, in regards to Adorno’s theories about how people escape into pop music because they are in capable of giving effort and creativity to music listening after dealing with the demanding realities of everyday life, I feel this song and the Taylor Swift persona in general serves as an illustrative example.  Most definitely this tune is outfitted with an incredibly catchy and repetitive beat, it is not trying to be particularly original, its only motive seems to be inclusion for all listeners, as the lyrics suggest.  As Adorno says “Standardization of song hits keeps the customers in line by doing their listening for them” (69).  This song was designed to be a hit.  The lyrics and the message serve a function as well, by positing to young people that “haters gonna hate” and there’s nothing you can do about it but to ignore it, also promotes a kind of passivity to the very real and dangerous issues that gossip are having on contemporary youth. There have been a great deal of teen suicides linked to cyber bullying in the past few years and this song and her accompanying charitable deeds seem to play to a collective concern for this issue. She has created a commodity that popular media has hailed and accepted as a great example of a straight, white, rich, american who is standing up for the rights of us all.

What I find interesting is that Storey goes on to question the longevity of Adorno’s analysis due to movements in pop music that have taken place since 1941 but it struck me that pop music seems to have come almost full circle since then.  More than ever pop music seems to be controlled by a capitalist interest, because due to the accessibility of the internet major labels are no longer supporting smaller, less conventional artists because there is no money to do so.  Instead the market seems to be saturated with artists who are primed to be “sure things” and heavily marketed in this way. So, is pop music promoting a standardized passivity to complex and relevent issues? or is this just a theory I should shake off?