The young adult genre (or YA, as it is more often referred to as) is easy to make fun of–– they represent the teenage years of our lives that most…
I don’t often talk earnestly about Taylor Swift. I’m not sure why, either; my bizarre parasocial relationship with this woman more often than not ends in me joking about her,…
A track-by-track review. Well, friends, here we are. For the second time this year, Taylor Swift has surprise-released an album. Conceived as “folklore‘s sister record,” evermore—Swift’s ninth studio album—comes from…
Get your cardigan; it’s Swiftie season.
Credit: Taylor Swift and VEVO
The haters really are going to hate.
Taylor Swift has now found herself in a legal battle over her hit song of off her album 1989, “Shake It Off”. According to the BBC, Swift is being sued by American R&B singer Jesse Graham to the tune of $42 million. Additionally, Graham is suing for his name to be added as a co-writer on the song. He claims that the phrases “haters gone hate” and “playas gone play” are both copyrighted by him.
“And if you’re looking for someone to write your break-up songs about / Baby I’m perfect,” sings Niall Horan of One Direction, all but confirming that “Perfect,” 1D’s latest single in which the not-so-subtle lyrics appear, was written in regard to Harry Styles’s and Taylor Swift’s 2012 relationship.
Just kidding, technically it’s not fall until Wednesday. It’s pretty darn close though.
So here’s the deal: in October of last year Taylor Swift released her most recent album, 1989. It was a runaway success, selling the greatest number of albums in its first week since The Eminem Show released in 2002 according to MTV. Swift has since gone on an incredibly successful tour which will be swinging by Nashville on the 25th. I’d remind all Taylor Swift fans to buy tickets, but let’s face it-at this point they’re over $200 and you probably should have picked them up months ago. However, I’m not here to write about Swift’s upcoming show. Instead, I want to talk about the recent 1989 cover craze.
Just last week, pop star Taylor Swift bought up two new websites: TaylorSwift.porn and TaylorSwift.adult. I doubt it will surprise many of you to hear that neither of these sites will be utilized for their implied purpose. Instead, this is another instance of “domain squatting”, where an individual purchases a domain name either with the intent to profit off of a large amount of ads placed on a legitimate-sounding domain, or in this instance to prevent others from having the domain title. With Swift’s high degree of visibility, it was probably a good PR move. Not all celebrities have been that lucky, however.
The most elaborate musical prank of this week is no doubt the Aphex Twin/Taylor Swift mashup album. The cartoonist who put Aphex Swift together put forth an astonishing amount of effort to link two totally different artists. The most shocking thing isn’t the choice of artists, however, since there are already endless examples of absurd mashups floating around the web. No, the shocking thing is that this WTF pairing is so well done.
My initial reaction is that there’s no way Aphex Swift works at all, but on several subsequent spins I have to admit that there’s something going on here. “Starlightlicker” is the song that gets the closest to working in any traditional sense, no doubt because “Windowlicker” is the closest Aphex Twin has come to any sort of pop crossover. It’s surrounded by “T4ouble” and “We Are Never Getting Girl/Boygether”, both of which pace hectic breakbeat productions from Richard D. James Album with two of Swift’s most massive pop smashes. Initially I’m convinced that these two tracks speed up the tempo on “4” and “Girl/Boy Song” because they sound impossibly complex underneath Swift’s one-line-at-a-time delivery, but on further review the tempo is unchanged. The juxtaposition serves as a vivid reminder of just how unique and unhinged each of Aphex Twin’s pseudorandom productions is.