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‘Mastermind’ Taylor Swift drives hoards of fans to voter registration site
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
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United States | News & Politics
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Do people mention pop music/musicians in general? It tends to be stuff that goes completely over my radar so I don't know, but I feel like it's usually not the kind of music people really talk about. My experience with things like prog rock, metal, indie rock, a lot of electronic music, etc, is that people tend to discuss the songwriting, the riffs, the sound design, and so on, but pop music's generally felt like something that people stop thinking about the moment the next song comes on on the radio.
Either way, I'm aware of Taylor Swift and that she's incredibly popular but I can't have heard more than four or five of her songs ever, and I can't remember any of them. I remember something about a screaming goat meme being made out of one of her songs about a decade ago, if that counts! I guess I just move in completely different musical circles.
I'd wager the prevalence of music streaming plays a huge role in this. We're well past the age where everyone in your area was listening to the same handful of radio stations.
Oh, absolutely! Everyone's in their own bubbles these days (and few people more than me, honestly - my tastes are pretty damn niche). But I also think there's probably just less to discuss about most pop music because it's kind of just the musical status quo. That's not to say it's lesser - if people enjoy it then it's doing what it's supposed to - but it doesn't tend to have noteworthy musicianship, songwriting, technical details, etc, that are worth bringing up in conversation, and it doesn't tend to stand out in a "you have to listen to this, I guarantee you've never heard anything like it!" kind of way.
Kinda. We talk about a lot of currently popular musicians, such as:
But Taylor Swift never comes up, unless there was some weird story at a concert or something. I rarely talk about pop (again, not my thing), but I honestly couldn't tell you any song by Taylor Swift from the past 5 years.