Pop Goes the West. Not With a Bang, But a Taylor Swift Tour

The evolution of Pop from being the music of freedom to being the official soundscape of the dumbest regimes

Sometimes the most infuriating aspect of living through dystopia is not the lies, but the mediocrity.

Dystopia’s have no room for genuine creativity, genius, or talent. Any manifestation of these would inevitably challenge the dystopia itself, which is always an ugly thing built by a collection of fools.

During the Soviet era and the Cold War, western culture was producing a vibrancy and excitement that the heavily regulated, controlled and oppressed artists of the Communist world could not possibly match. The great writers of the Soviet period were the ones who were not officially approved. Everyone from singers to painters to ballet dancers, if they got the chance, defected to the West.

Creativity doesn’t flourish when a man with a clipboard and a gun is examining every line for forbidden things. Or when every successful artist is a regime puppet mouthing approved lines dictated by The Party.

By the end of the Cold War the cultural lesson of the difference between the West and the Soviet World was obvious. It wasn’t just that the West had full shelves and Russia had empty ones. It wasn’t purely about the economic failures of Communism. It was also about which system unleashed excitement and joy, and which buried these things beneath dour layers of mind-numbing bureaucracy.

In everything from architecture to music you could tell that the Soviet World crushed the human spirit. It was stark. It was ugly. The world was concrete and the concrete was poured in geometric blocks that had no trace of humanity to them. Soviet architectural Brutalism stopped bothering to pretend that Communism was anything more than a prison. The promised gleaming utopia, the Potemkin village of bucolic ease or the Modernist towers of chrome shaped like rockets aimed at a better galaxy, all faded into memory. Nothing was to be promised anymore. Everyone, even the most rabid commissars, had learned that the promises were lies.

So instead the Soviet system leaned into its ugliness. Perhaps the populace could be stupified into permanent submission? Perhaps the world could be made so bleak, so grey, so uniformly awful, that the psychological impact was crushed despair, preventing anyone from rising up?

But outside that monochrome world, the bright lights of the West were glittering. The Soviet citizen was a man in a desert, looking towards the blinking attractions of Las Vegas. The sights drew him nearer. The sounds of a party were so much more attractive than the words of The Party.

Nobody picks concrete misery when Bright Lights, beautiful women, song and joy are so clearly available elsewhere. Or at least they only pick concrete misery if Vegas has already robbed them blind.

Today, we are in a very different situation. The modern Communist is aligned entirely with the modern Bright Lights. The pop bubble has long since burst, revealing its essential emptiness. Its not the sound of freedom anymore, or the soundtrack of a better life. Communist China can build the big bright cities, and the Beautiful People of the West-the singers, the actors, the artists, the writers, the ones wearing sequins and dancing on stage-are all Communists in a fresh shape.

Just as the Chinese Communist Party allowed a certain amount of capitalism to gain all those material benefits, so too did people who crave a totally controlled, State directed, devoid of freedom future where all creativity is shackled to the propaganda of One Party, learn that they needed Big Business and Show Business firmly on side.

The alliance of the most radical and the most wealthy, the unification of Business and State, the tyranny that again promises a technological utopia, needs its happy heralds and dancing fools. It needs a swirl of color and life, a spectacle to distract the eye from the needles and the prison cells.

Don’t just build a prison. Don’t just control thoughts and speech. Paint rainbows everywhere. Make it a big decadent party. Let them sing the songs you put in their mouths, as if they had found them in their hearts.

And so we come to Taylor Swift.

Try telling me that Taylor Swift is a natural phenomenon, an organic outburst of talent, just a young lady with an excess of talent who lucked out. Try telling me she sells something worth selling. Try telling me that seeing every single magazine on a rack screaming ‘Taylor Swift’ with her face and her image and every third article written in every publication screaming “Oh my God I love her SOOOO Much!!!” like a 12 year old is something natural, or something that happened based purely on music.

And I will tell you that you are a simpering moron.

Taylor Swift is a Plastic Goddess for an age of inauthenticity. She’s more artificial than Barbie, more synthetic and cynically moulded than the diversity of a Netflix cast.

Previous Pop or Rock hysteria recipients-everyone from Sinatra to Michael Jackson, including Elvis, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, had some actual talent. The kids started screaming their names BEFORE the media told them to. Their fame and popularity snowballed, and media coverage helped that, but it was a natural avalanche.

With Taylor Swift the content is so pitiable, the talent so minimal, the sound so manufactured, bland and uninteresting, that its almost back to Soviet regime approved poetry. These aren’t great universal emotions of love and loss. This isn’t an incredibly powerful or unique voice. This isn’t a following that grew by itself.

The Media set explosive charges along the heights of Mount Culture, and detonated them. In all human history, only Donald Trump has received as much media attention as Taylor Swift. The first you are instructed to hate. The second you are instructed to love. The Swift avalanche was a deliberate, controlled, directed explosion.

This is so obvious and glaring that anyone who actually LIKES Taylor Swift, and thinks they reached that conclusion independently, merely signals to the psy-op specialists and the directors of public opinion that they are the perfect mark, the empty cretinous vessel waiting to be filled and even more susceptible to that than the mask wearing Covidians or the flag waving Instant Ukrainians.

Indeed, since there seems to be no actual purpose to the obscene inflation of Swift that has occurred, with even getting her to endorse Biden seeming like a waste of the vast effort expended in pumping her up, perhaps this is all it is.

A litmus test of just how fucking stupid and malleable we all are. A playing out in a non-serious field of the same skills of public misdirection, manipulation and even coercion that are used for important things like whether we are happy to go to war. Maybe this is just the psychological warfare operatives training exercise.

“OK make this bland nonentity who can’t dance with an average voice and 6 out of 10 looks the biggest pop star the world has ever seen. And when you’ve done that, Roger, we can put you on the Ukraine account….”

For those of you who still tend to think ‘conspiracy theory’ when anyone postulates that a mass mainstream media promotion could possibly be directed and controlled rather than, say, something 20,000 editors just coincidentally became obsessed with, I direct your gaze to the portly figure of Piers Morgan, one of the premier shills of the Hack Journalism Hamster Wheel, and the remarkable article Reliable Piers has posted in today’s Sun newspaper.

In one of the biggest pieces in the entire paper, we see the somewhat grotesque spectacle of what a mainstream journalist is prepared to do to keep his snout in the media trough. Amusingly, the very title of the piece has to begin with an acknowledgement that the focus of the article is actually pretty shit-I’ve seen better singers and musicians than Taylor Swift in my time, but she has something that blows other stars away.

Yes, Piers, she does-a fucking psy-op. And shills like you blowing smoke up her ass on instructions from above.

Piers Morgan is 59 years old. He is very much a grown man. He’s supposedly heterosexual. He’s supposedly interested in important things and a commentator on serious issues like gun control and medical measures during an alleged pandemic. Here is Serious Heterosexual Piers explaining to us how much he LOOOOVES Taylor Swift:

“Ironically, given that Taylor sings a lot about suffering, she feels like a much needed antidote to all the suffering everyone’s endured through the past few years of deadly viruses, wars, and cost-of-living crises.

The show is a spectacular flame-fuelled cavalcade of of cheeky fun interlaced with very real, heartfelt honesty about love lost and won, life endured and enjoyed, hopes dashed and reborn.

But ultimately it is about being happy; how to find it, how to keep it, how to rescue it from the depths of despair.”

Wow, some fine writing there from Hack HQ. Remember, this is a 59 year old married man who just like his 12 year old daughter needs INSTRUCTIONS from Taylor Swift on how to be happy.

It’s hard to imagine how much more a man can emasculate himself than by attending a Taylor Swift concert and dancing to Taylor Swift songs about what it feels like as a teenage-mentality narcissistic girl to break up with a hunky boy. Oh right. He can pen a fucking article about it.

It’s like Piers watched Prince William doing the Cuck Dance, and said to himself “I’ll see your dance, and raise you….”.

Honestly, I can’t help think that there are boot-licking, strap-on taking, pegged to oblivion submissives who would consider Pier’s Taylor Swift article a step too far down the road of sissification. “I’m not doing that-it’s humiliating!”.

But there’s actually a lot that is rather telling in Piers commentary. Let’s set aside the fact that no grown adult male can really enjoy this turgid mediocrity as music. The way a mainstream media shill tries to explain his sudden interest in music for teenage girls is itself fascinating. There are two ways Piers does this. Only the second one of those refers to the supposed emotional impact of the ‘art’ being discussed.

The first is commercial. Piers is interested in Taylor on a mercenary level, as a force of capitalism:

“Her 152-date Eras stadium tour will gross more than £15 billion from ticket sales alone…Merch rakes her in another £1.5 million PER NIGHT, adding £228 million to the pot, and the movie of the show netted another £204 million, taking the overall revenue income to nearly £2 billion….And that’s before we get into the massive global Taylor economy boost which has seen cities all over the world, including London, enjoy surging Swift-related spending from hotels, restaurants, taxis, shops, car rentals and sight seeing.”

All this is darkly hilarious. Piers is basically letting us know he’s a crude materialist, obsessed with the financial value of things rather than the real value of them (the thing that should be judged in an artistic review of any kind). Aesthetic judgement of the music and the show is almost entirely absent, other than the kind of “fun!”, “amazing!” and “spectacular!” one word expressions of delight that comes on a crude promotional poster for a travelling circus (which is what Pier’s article is).

Piers doesn’t tell us any of the lyrics of any of the songs, an omission that is curious in terms of offering an actual review but extremely merciful given what those lyrics are and the paucity of thought they represent. Even the shills paid to keep inflating this crap don’t like telling us what it actually consists of. Because there’s nothing real or worthwhile there. He doesn’t describe any of the dance routines or imagery either. In terms of content you learn as much from the review as you would from a blind deaf mute describing the same experience.

But you do get this initial government accountants take on the Taylor hysteria, a series of reflections that undermine the following claims of an emotional connection with a 34 year old woman’s perpetual teen relationship drama. You get the gross old man-childish mind of that “Merch” comment-what the fuck is that? you can’t write ‘merchandise’? You think tour tat flogging is hip and cool, daddy-o?

Still, its reassuring to hear from a State shill that there is some plan in place to counteract the massive debt, inflation and economic ruin that these governments have inflicted on us. Note the nature of the businesses Taylor Swift is supposedly resurrecting-hotels and restaurants, taxis, shops- the hospitality industry and the retail industry.

Hey, aren’t those the very sectors you lot just destroyed three or four years ago with the lockdowns that Piers Morgan and Taylor Swift strongly supported?

Apparently, then, we can stop remembering the vast wealth transfers and wasted spending and sheer economic lunacy of the COVID era because there is a plan for prosperity again.

Taylor Swift concerts. These are going to kick start the economy, according to government sanctioned Culture & Economics Professor (Chair of Taylor Swift Studies) Piers Morgan. Well, perhaps it is a little more convincing than the idea that wind farms will.

What we are receiving is not so much a cultural or concert review, as a psy-op pile on intended to sell us various lines of bullshit. Things like ‘your economy can function on happy-sad-happy Pop trash instead of oil and real manufacturing’. It’s selling an economic cover-up (“hey, it can’t be that bad….people are buying crazy expensive Taylor Swift merchandise!”).

Having shrunk the affluent middle class through economic mismanagement and manufactured disasters for the transfer of wealth to billionaires, they then psy-op the untouched, fortunately still well off parents of what remains of the middle class along to Big Happy Concerts in order to pretend that Everything is Back to Normal. Because there aren’t any working class families going to those ridiculously expensive Taylor Swift concerts.

Those families are either lining up at food banks or voting for “far right extremists”.

The class of Taylor Swift fan is the same class of Remain voter, Trump hater, Ukraine lover, I’ve Got My Jab poser, Climate Change protester-the middle class, and normally specifically the parts of the middle class that suck on the tits of the State or the squishy nectar pouches of the worst woke corporations.

And all the celebs, journalists, actors, princes and shills in every bright costume and every synthetic dream, must attend, must flock to the Taylor Swift dance party just as they flock to the selected Party of Power. Look, there’s Prince William! Look, there’s Paul McCartney! Look, there’s Keir Starmer! Dancing, dancing, dancing.

“Oh my God I LOOOVE HER!”

Mass medical experiment on you all, you say? I don’t remember THAT.

Excess deaths you say? That’s CRAZY TALK.

Psychological warfare specialists on supposedly scientific and medical advisory panels? Bore off, conspiracy theorist, I’m LOVING Taylor Swift!

And they even tell you what it is, like a stage magician explaining his act. Piers describes Taylor as the antidote. This comes in the second explanation of why a 59 year old dances to Taylor Swift, the ‘she expresses all our suffering and gives us happiness’ explanation which casts Swift as some kind of redemptive She-Christ. He links this trashy spectacular of Pop mediocrity directly with the last few years of political madness in ways that flat out tell us that this crap, this awful manufactured Joy, is supposed to be the soporific reward making us forget everything they did to us already, or to remember it in a way that is controlled and directed, in a way that excuses everything as justified or as shared suffering that those who inflicted, insisted on it, and engineered it ALSO suffered:

“I found the most poignant moment to be when she spoke about the pandemic, and how she feared we might never do this together again…”

How poignant indeed. Says the same man who three years ago in the same mainstream media newspaper (as well as on X/Twitter) that features his Swiftgasm said this:

“People who refuse to get jabbed but whine about lockdowns really are a special breed of stupid selfish pricks.”

Bur NOW, we were and are all in it together. We all suffered together, and nobody created it, nobody created vaccines that killed people, nobody enforced and demanded lockdowns that didn’t work, nobody took away basic rights, nobody demonized those who saw through that serious bullshit just as we see through this Swift loving trivial bullshit too. In It Together was a globalist slogan of authoritarians and their media puppets during COVID. Piers repeats it for a POP CONCERT (“The subliminal theme of the whole show was “We’re in this together” and she never stopped reminding her fans of that.”).

So the emotional argument is that Taylor transforms our COVID suffering into post COVID Joy, like a religious agape, a ceremony of transfiguration and redemption for people who can only deeply feel when told to do so, and who have probably lost the capacity for actual human emotions that arise from within or from some genuine spirit of tradition. Taylor Joy is as manufactured as Pandemic Fear, and it too is a product to take in the absence of real humanity.

It doesn’t matter whether they are trying to make you feel fear before injecting you with a poison, or trying to make you feel joy because Taylor Swift will sing your troubles away. The point is that from the serious to the trivial, and in ways that make serious things ludicrous and trivial things significant, they are trying to control you and determined that everyone should feel what they are instructed to feel.

You will own nothing, and you will BE HAPPY:

“My first impression as I entered Wembley was the sheer palpable joy and excitement on everyone’s faces…I looked at Elise and her friend, both singing and dancing with delirious joy. And then I looked around to see everyone else doing the same…..True or not, she made us believe it.”

They used the Fear already. Why would anyone think that synthetic Joy is any less of a weapon? And THAT is why Taylor Swift is everywhere and Piers Morgan dances, as he always has, to the tune set by his masters.