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The music video and the song’s lyrics are all about breaking the rules unapologetically…How confusing, then, that “Shake It Off” musically represents…Taylor Swift’s arrival as a run-of-the-mill, straight-and-narrow pop artist.” It cheers for individual distinctness in the most generic voice possible. But this tension isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. It articulates a paradox central to white identity in a white supremacist society: for whites, the generic and the individual coincide because the generic is nothing but a false generalization of/from white existence and experience. In “Shake It Off,” what appears to be uncontrived expression is really the contrivances of whiteness as they materialize in Swift’s body and musical performance.
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