Photo courtesy of Big Machine Records

Written by Steven Bielefield

I really didn’t want to have to review this. I wish that I could review another movie, but a) Sommer already took Gone Girl, and b) I’m due to review a song this week. And I was really hoping that there’d be something new to review, but I guess that’s too much to ask from Billboard’s Hot 100 (specifically the top 10), which hasn’t seen any new popular songs for the last month or so. Well, time to bite the bullet. Let’s take a look at Taylor Swift’s “Shake it Off.”

Taylor Swift used to actually have an identity. I don’t mean that in a “she used to be good,” sort of way, but at least she possessed some kind of identity back when she still sang country. But once she realized that country is not where the money (or popularity) was at, she quickly jumped ship over to pop (and much of country’s other artists soon after followed suit). Now her most famous song is one that is specifically made to sound like every other pop song out there. In “Shake it Off,” Swift addresses criticisms towards her and says she’s gonna shake them off (ah, now I see where the title of the song comes from).

I remember there was a joke on (I think) Saturday Night Live a few years ago that Taylor Swift would go on to become a hip-hop artist. There was a funny skit and everything with T-Swizzle rapping and acting all gangsta, and it was hilarious. Nobody thought it would actually happen… and now she’s made the classic hip-hop style “forget the haters” song. It gets more ridiculous the more I think about it.

Of course, the funny thing about any song about haters is, simply, they’re counterintuitive. Every one of these songs is all the same; the artist saying they don’t care about the haters. But if you don’t care about the haters, why are you writing a song about them? That’s the first major issue with Swift’s song; it’s not really believable that she’s just shaking off the criticisms, because she made an entire song about them!

Swift gets picked on a lot, mainly for writing songs about her breakups, but to be honest I don’t get why. For one thing, it’s not the only thing she writes about, it’s just what most of her singles are about. For another, what else is she supposed to write about? It’s a perfectly fair topic, and they all do well, so why shouldn’t she write about her breakups? But to digress, I understand that she gets a lot of criticism.

But there is a saying on the Internet that she really needs to understand: “Don’t feed the trolls.” By making this song in and of itself, she is validating every one of those critics who give her crap. She’s showing that she’s thin-skinned and only encourages them to complain even more about her. The best way to react to them is to ignore the criticisms that aren’t constructive.

As for the rest of the song, it’s not much. It’s catchy, to be sure; Swift goes along with will.i.am as a master of the earworm. Her songs are catchy as all get-out, and once you hear them they stick with you all day (or longer). I still hear people humming and singing this song as they walk around, six weeks after its release. So, kudos for that, I suppose.

Overall, though, the song is vapid, formulaic, and contradicts itself, in more ways than just the one I went on about for several paragraphs. There’s a bit in the song where everything stops and Swift says the following:

“Just think while you’ve been getting down and out/ about the liars and the dirty, dirty cheats of the world,/ You could’ve been getting down to this sick beat.”

It’s distracting, and it just draws attention to how stupid and annoying the song really is.

So there’s my piece on this song. I don’t like it very much (which I’m sure comes as a shock to you). Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go shake this song out of my head.