Taylor Swift is many things—singer, songwriter, undeniably savvy businesswoman, cat owner, Spotify hater, crafter, consummate urbanite—but she is not metal. She does not know what it is to truly shred, and no amount of Iron Maiden T-shirts from Urban Outfitters can change that.
Swift does know the phrase “sick beats,” however, not least because she now owns it for merchandizing purposes. That narrow definition means that you don’t have to write Taylor Swift a check every time you say the words “sick beats” out loud, much as how Paris Hilton doesn’t appear demanding a quarter every time you touch a hot stove. But metal musician Ben Norton isn’t making such fine distinctions, and has composed a protest song called “This Sick Beat™” in order to stick it to Swift and all who would pervert sick beats for their own capitalist purposes. “If you give the bourgeoisie an inch, they will take a mile…They have already privatized land, water, and words. After language, they will next try to privatize air,” Norton says.
The song, the lyrics of which consist entirely of the words “This Sick Beat,” isn’t (to put it mildly) as catchy as the average Taylor Swift single. But that’s just because the cultural hegemony of the capitalist machine has trained your brain to find Swift’s particular arrangement of sick beats pleasing so you keep running on the hamster wheel of consumerism until you die, man.
[story via Death And Taxes]