{"id":20095,"date":"2015-06-12T06:00:29","date_gmt":"2015-06-12T10:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=20095"},"modified":"2015-06-10T18:50:20","modified_gmt":"2015-06-10T22:50:20","slug":"taylor-swifts-bad-blood-video-too-many-drops-to-be-pop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2015\/06\/12\/taylor-swifts-bad-blood-video-too-many-drops-to-be-pop\/","title":{"rendered":"Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” Video–Too Many Drops To Be ‘Pop’"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to Steven Shaviro<\/a>, the combination of digital media and neoliberal capitalism has changed the way movies are composed, their underlying logic. I\u2019ve argued<\/a> that these changes in film composition parallel recent-ish changes in pop music song composition. Brostep sounds like Transformers<\/a> having sex<\/a> because, well, Skrillex and Michael Bay are using the same basic methods to achieve the same general aesthetic. (Seriously, there\u2019s a \u201cTransformers having sex<\/a>\u201d tag on Mixcloud.) This 2011 video mashes a Transformers clip with a brostep song, and in the same way that 2 Many DJs showed that \u201cSmells Like Teen Spirit\u201d and \u201cBootylicious\u201d are effectively the same song structure, it shows that Bey and brostep are effectively the same compositional structure.<\/p>\n\"YouTube<\/a><\/span><\/span>\n

But that\u2019s all a preface to what I really want to talk about: Taylor Swift\u2019s \u201cBad Blood\u201d video.<\/p>\n\"YouTube<\/a><\/span><\/span>\n

Like \u201cWe Are Never, Ever Getting Back Together,\u201d \u201cBad Blood\u201d is another Max Martin produced pop dubstep track, with verses and choruses organized around a soar or a drop. The first soar\/drop happens as Swift\u2019s character is getting suited up by the Trinity, around 1:20-1:30. Here the handclaps rhythmically intensify till a drop, but a drop with no wobble. We just land on the downbeat as Swift sings \u201cnow,\u201d and the bass and percussion comes back in. [1] This is repeated at 2:15. These soars take us from the verses into the choruses; they\u2019re mini-climaxes.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The main drop happens at the end of the bridge leading into the final chorus (the same place it is in WANEGBT and in \u201cShake It Off\u201d). As in \u201cShake It Off,\u201d Swift\u2019s voice provides the wobble. Here, it\u2019s where she sings, on a single repeated pitch, \u201cBlood runs thin.\u201d As she sings the drop, Catastrophe (Swift) appears as a redhead, and Kendrick Lamar, who raps the verses, has disappeared, visually, from the rest of the video, as Catastrophe leads a party of all her gal pals in a final showdown with Arsyn (Gomez). This drop is the most musically important part of the song, just as this shot is the most visually and narratively important. To explain why it is the most visually and narratively important piece of the video, let me first pull back and contextualize the video in terms of the rest of 1989<\/i>, the album on which \u201cBad Blood\u201d appears.<\/p>\n

This is the second catalog video from 1989. \u201cShake It Off\u201d catalogues different styles of femininity, each associated with a different musical genre (and sometimes music video, such as the \u201cHey Mickey!\u201d reference); Swift\u2019s character transcends these feminine stereotypes, embodying what is supposedly her own distinct and quirky self. In the same way that \u201cShake It Off\u201d catalogues both genres of femininity and music\/music video genres, \u201cBad Blood\u201d catalogues both kinds of women and movie references. The video references a slew of scifi\/action films: Kill Bill, Tron, Fifth Element, Sin City, etc. (even the Kingsmen?). Similarly, a panoloy of women celebreties (Lena Dunham, Ellie Goulding, Marishka Hargitay, Jessical Alba, just to name a few) practice a skill with Catastrophe (maybe she\u2019s learning from them?), a skill they can use to battle her frenemy Arsyn; so again, as in \u201cShake It Off,\u201d Swift\u2019s character sublates a whole bunch of different femininities into her own identity: she can be the transcendent mix of all women, she can do everything but the rest of her crew can do only one thing each. And this sublation is represented, visually, by the change in hair color from blonde to red.<\/p>\n

Narratively, this hair color change happens when Kendrick Lamar visually drops out of the video. He rapped the verses, and throughout the soar up to the main drop, he and Catastrophe appear in complementary half-face shots, as though they were two halves of the same face, one white, one black; one woman, one man. Could Catastrophe\u2019s red hair be an indication that she\u2019s also sublated Kendrick, his (very very respectable) blackness into her multiracial feminine mix? Could this sublation of Kendrick, his blackness, and his rapping, be part of her broader effort to distance herself from genre narrowness and claim instead a pluralist pop omnivorousness?<\/p>\n

I think so…mainly because \u201cBad Blood\u201d\u2019s invisible reference is Michael Jackson\u2019s \u201cJam<\/a>.\u201d \u201cBad Blood\u201d is Swift\u2019s first song featuring a black rapper. (She was featured on B.O.B.\u2019s \u201cBoth Of Us,\u201d but that was his track, on his album.) \u201cJam\u201d was Jackson\u2019s first and most prominent track with a rap feature. Tamara Roberts<\/a> argues that \u201cJam,\u201d like many of Jackson\u2019s songs, has \u201da sound that consisted of the transracial base that was his musical heritage punctuated by carefully wielded hyperracial sounds such as hard rock guitar and rap vocals\u201d (26). \u201cJam\u201d uses hyperracially coded sonic features, like electric rock guitar (which reads white) or rap (which reads black) in combination to establish and reaffirm that pop is a transracial mix of racially-coded genres. Thus, as Roberts continues, \u201cwhen he supposedly integrated MTV in 1982, Jackson did not racially cross over but redefined what the mainstream was: a space in which an interracial and intercultural musical past gets filtered through a hyperracial frame\u201d (26). So, since the 1980s, \u201cpop\u201d has been a genre that sublates racially coded parts into a mainstream mix: it calls on hyperracially coded elements only to both negate-and-preserve them (hence this Hegelian language of sublation). As Robert puts it, \u201cthe multiracial\/cultural legacy of Jackson\u2019s pop kingdom, in which contemporary artists not only imagine a vast world of racialized sounds in their library but also weave them together with self-conscious acknowledgement of their juxtaposition\u201d (36). In this light, \u201cBad Blood\u2019s\u201d use of Kendrick is part of 1989\u2019s sustained campaign to establish Swift as a <\/b>pop<\/i><\/b> artist: she is pop in the same way that the King of Pop is. <\/b>Swift uses hyperracially coded elements to demonstrate a transracial (but not necessarily non-white supremacist) mainstream mix.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s go back to the drop. I talked a little about the video\u2019s visual narrative above, but here I want to focus on the music. Leading up to the drop, there\u2019s a bridge focused mainly on Swift\u2019s lyrically melodic vocals; most of the dubsteppy instruments drop out. KL punctuates the end of the first repetition; this is the first time he and TS appear in split-faced split screen. In the second repetition, TS punctuates the fourth beat of every measure with a Lumineers-style \u201cHey!,\u201d and KL responds on the and of four with an \u201caaaah\u201d; when this happens, they\u2019re in split screens, but Janus-headded rather than split-faced (notably, they\u2019ve switched sides; TS is now on the right, KL on the left). At the climax just before the drop, TS and KL appear full-faced in split screen, and sing in unison \u201cIf you live like that\u2026\u201d; this leads directly to the drop. So we have all these musical combinations of TS & KL that culminate in red-headed Catastrophe–she doesn\u2019t just sublate all the different types of women\/femininity, but Kendrick and his (totally respectable<\/a>) blackness, too. Catastrophe, like Taylor, is the strong, harmonious mix of diverse capacities, genres, types, whatever–she has all the different variables in the right arrangement. Contrast this with Arsyn and her gas-mask wearing army of mostly faceless women covered in all black everything). Catastrophe is bright and variable, Arsyn is dark and monotonous. This scene is an almost too-convenient illustration of Jared Sexton\u2019s claim that white supremacy has shifted the color line from a white\/non-white binary (where whiteness is to be kept pure, one drop of non-white blood makes you not white) to a non-black\/black binary (where queer\/non-bourgeois blackness is to be kept from contaminating the otherwise healthy pluralist mix).<\/p>\n

The song is clearly part of 1989\u2019s sustained campaign to situate TS as pop, that is, as belonging to a genre that calls on racialized (and gendered–dubstep clearly reads as masculine, aka \u201cbros need their drops!\u201d) musical genre markers in order to present itself as transcending the very differences it (re)articulates as narrow and limited. At this drop, the video reflects this narrative of TS-as-pluralist-heroine.<\/p>\n

But the two drops in the beginning of the video undercut the centrality of the song\u2019s main drop in the video<\/i>\u2019s structure. The video changes the composition of the song: it gives us two drops before the song even starts. First, the opening scene goes from a shot of the London skyline, birthplace of dubstep (the faint British police siren in the background is reminiscent of The Clash\u2019s \u201cWhite Riot,\u201d which also opens with just a police siren…is this Swift getting a girl riot of her own? We know how much she likes to Lean In.), to a shot of an office [2]. A a body lands on an office desk, its thud coinciding with our first gut-punching bass hit, which echoes when we\u2019re introduced to each Catastrophe and Arsyn. We then get some very post-WIlliams\/Elfman superhero film score march version of the \u201cBad Blood\u201d hook as Catastrophe and Arsyn set up the narrative of the video: they collaborate in the beginning, but at the end of the introduction Arsyn turns on Catastrophe. This betrayal gives us the second drop:Arsyn kicks Catastrophe out a window. We get a weak wobble right as Catastrophe crashes through the window, and as her body hits a car below, we have no cinematic sound for this, or any representation of the crash in the accompanying music, as we do in the opening scene.<\/p>\n

Kahn gives us two drops with actual<\/i> bass (and maybe sub-bass? I\u2019ve only listened on earbuds so I don\u2019t know. But they sound as fully resonant and bone-shaking as any big-budget action movie soundtrack.). Compared to TS\u2019s sung treble drop, these prefatory drops sound more powerful (and, maybe, dare I say, \u201cauthentic\u201d?) than her popped-up version at the song\u2019s climax. So, even though the big explosion scene at the end might be the video\u2019s narrative climax, the first two drops are its sonic<\/i> climax. \u00a0As TS and Max Martin wrote the song, \u201cBad Blood\u201d climaxes like a conventional pop song does: late, after two smaller climaxes. As Kahn reworks it, \u201cBad Blood\u201d climaxes like a lot of contemporary EDM does: early and often. Kahn\u2019s soundtrack de-centers the sung drop as the musical or sonic climax of \u201cBad Blood.\u201d If today most action movies are non-narrative, following something like the compositional logic of a dubstep track more than the expository logic of traditional narrative, then we hear the organization more than we see it (this is Shaviro\u2019s point). And the organization we hear doesn\u2019t treat Catastrophe as the sublation of all the racialized, gendered genres into one pop mix.<\/p>\n

And perhaps in so doing, in making both the song and the video work more like dubstep and less like pop, Kahn\u2019s video de-centers, or at least destabilizes, makes wobbly, \u201cBad Blood\u2019s\u201d racial narrative. Instead of transcending hyperracialized genre markers, \u201cBad Blood\u201d merely follows, anticlimactically, from them. I mean, doesn\u2019t Kenderick\u2019s first verse say: \u201cI don\u2019t hate you but I hate to critique, overrate you\/These beats of a dark heart\/use basslines to replace you\u201d?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[1] Right around 1:32\/3, swift sings a staccato \u201cHey!\u201d–she\u2019s invoking a pop trend that started a few years ago with The Lumineers\u2019 \u201cHey Ho.\u201d Such \u201cHey!\u201ds also appear on Katy Perry\u2019s \u201cDark Horse\u201d (just as \u201cBad Blood\u201d is Swift\u2019s track with a black male rapper, \u201cDark Horse\u201d was Perry\u2019s–Juicy J). This perhaps lends some credence that the person Swift has bad blood with is indeed Perry. Less gossipy and more music-y, it\u2019s noticeable that this percussive \u201cHey!\u201d is a common feature of a lot of pop songs, whereas trap employs \u201cHey!\u201d in a different way. In trap songs, there\u2019s a sample of a male choral \u201cHey!\u201d that usually gets played on every offbeat. So unlike Chris Molanphy<\/a>, I see the \u201cHey!\u201d in BB as fundamentally different than the DJ Mustard-style trap \u201cHey!\u201d
\n[2] There\u2019s a lot more to say here about the particular shot of London we get–Canary Wharf–and its pre- and post-gentrification relationship to early grime and dubstep, and how that might also affect how we hear the song. But I\u2019d want to reread Dan Hancox\u2019s Dizzie book before I said anything more than \u201chey, this probably matters.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

According to Steven Shaviro, the combination of digital media and neoliberal capitalism has changed the way movies are composed, their underlying logic. I\u2019ve argued that these changes in film composition parallel recent-ish changes in pop music song composition. Brostep sounds like Transformers having sex because, well, Skrillex and Michael Bay are using the same basic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1929,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1929"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20095"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20095\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20099,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20095\/revisions\/20099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}