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You’d have to return to the height years of Bob Dylan’s cultural relevance, when one critic cum stalker began looking out the songwriter’s rubbish for clues about his lyrics, to discover a musician who attracts as many novice code breakers as Taylor Swift does. Swift has fed the frenzy by declaring that her songs, her liner notes, her social-media posts—principally every thing round her—might need hidden meanings embedded in them. As she advised The Washington Put up in 2022, she and her followers have “descended into coloration coding, numerology, phrase searches, elaborate hints, and Easter eggs.”
That scavenger-hunt mentality can lead would-be decoders in instructions the singer won’t favor, as with the “Gaylors” who seek for indicators that Swift is secretly queer. Now a distinct subculture is getting in on the act: A piece of the GOP has been conjuring alleged proof that Swift is a deep-state psy-op, and that possibly—we’re simply asking questions right here—the NFL is in on it.
This idea acquired its first burst of mainstream consideration final month, when Fox’s Jesse Watters aired a video that, he claimed, exhibits that “the Pentagon psychological-operations unit floated turning Taylor Swift into an asset.” The particular person talking within the video was not actually from the Pentagon, she was citing Swift as a generic instance of superstar affect, and this all occurred years after Swift grew to become tremendous common anyway, however Watters nonetheless appeared to assume it would clarify “why or how she blew up like this.” He then interviewed a former FBI agent, who mentioned that Joe Biden’s presidential marketing campaign would really like Swift’s help (which is true) and that she might transfer substantial numbers of votes into Biden’s column (which isn’t the monitor file that pop-music endorsements have traditionally had in American politics).
The psy-op rumor mutated into its most notorious kind just a few weeks later. Vivek Ramaswamy, till lately a presidential candidate himself, posted on X, “I ponder who’s going to win the Tremendous Bowl subsequent month. And I ponder if there’s a significant presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall. Just a few wild hypothesis over right here, let’s see the way it ages over the following 8 months.”
Sure, that was a reference to Swift and her boyfriend, Travis Kelce of the Kansas Metropolis Chiefs. I’ve heard many ruminations through the years about each rigged elections and rigged Tremendous Bowls, however this is likely to be the primary time I’ve seen somebody suggest that plotters would possibly rig an election by rigging the Tremendous Bowl.
Apart from that new wrinkle, although, none of that is unprecedented. Actually, as bizarre because the psy-op story could sound, it’s only a few quick hops away from a moderately common mind-set about tradition. To listen to some individuals inform it, just about all pop is an op.
Conspiracy theories concerning the music trade are available many flavors. A century in the past, to provide one of many uglier examples, Henry Ford’s Dearborn Unbiased claimed {that a} “Jewish mix” was suppressing gentile music and selling jazz. “In style music is a Jewish monopoly,” the paper declared in 1921. “Jazz is a Jewish creation. The mush, the slush, the sly suggestion, the deserted sensuousness of sliding notes, are of Jewish origin.”
You didn’t need to be a Ford-style bigot to suspect {that a} cabal was behind the music you disliked. In 1958, Vance Packard—the creator of The Hidden Persuaders, a best-selling assault on the promoting trade—testified to the U.S. Senate that “the general public was manipulated into liking rock and roll” and that “the rock and roll, hillbilly, and Latin American actions had been largely engineered, manipulated for the pursuits of the [music-licensing group] BMI.” When a Michigan senator objected that lots of his constituents genuinely like hillbilly music, Packard agreeably replied, “I like a few of it too, however I feel the standard of it currently has been degenerating.”
The psychedelic ’60s gave us such pamphlets as David A. Noebel’s Communism, Hypnotism, and the Beatles (which claimed that the Kremlin was utilizing the Fab 4 to induce “synthetic neurosis” within the American baby) and Gary Allen’s That Music: There’s Extra to It Than Meets the Ear (which speculated that the Beatles’ music was “put collectively by behavioral scientists in some ‘assume tank’”). Then got here the backmasking panic that peaked within the ’80s, when a horde of ministers, academics, broadcasters, and legislators grew to become satisfied that conspirators had been inserting backwards satanic messages into rock information, the place they’d subliminally lead younger listeners to Lucifer.
However the preferred satan idea of music is likely to be the suspicion that the trade itself is one huge, sprawling maze of conspiracy, a suspicion that owes a lot of its recognition to the very fact that there’s a lot of reality to it. The music world is certainly full of secret plots, although they are usually extra petty than grand: Individuals have conspired through the years to bribe DJs, rip off artists’ royalties, juke the stats at streaming providers, and in any other case interact within the sometimes-sordid enterprise of producing hits and scooping up all they will of the income. And God is aware of the trade’s PR machines will be fountains of lies. So, sure: Music entrepreneurs function behind the scenes to create a picture and promote it, and generally they minimize some moral corners within the course of.
These information have fed a extra doubtful instinct, one which imagines the general public as a passive receptacle for the tradition trade’s output, robotically consuming no matter merchandise are pressed onto us. When Packard spoke with these senators, a lot of his testimony concerned believable claims about backroom enterprise practices. However he additionally declared that the trade might, if it wished, “make us all begin buzzing chants of zinc miners or marching tunes from the Struggle of 1812.” On this imaginative and prescient, the entrepreneurs will not be merely slippery however omnipotent. It’s ops all the best way down.
If you imagine that entrepreneurs have unlocked the key to inducing demand for undesirable items, it’s not tough to increase the story’s forged of characters to incorporate the national-security state, the White Home, or another villain you please. Certainly, covert forces generally do attempt to insert themselves into common tradition, as when the Pentagon affords moviemakers entry to its personnel and materials in alternate for script approval. When individuals study these actual propaganda pushes, it expands the vary of hidden operations they’re keen to think about.
However these puppet-master storylines tremendously overstate the viewers’s malleability. Viva Brother, the Cats film—there are numerous examples of relentlessly hyped musical merchandise that did not promote, the New Cokes of the sonic world. And it’s not believable that the trade could be any higher at promoting nonmusical merchandise, corresponding to presidential candidates.
Not even probably the most superior Pentagon program can reliably information what cultural merchandise we’ll purchase or what messages we’ll take away from them. If Taylor Swift actually had been an op, I doubt she’d be a very efficient one. It’s true that when she shared a hyperlink to Vote.org on Nationwide Voter Registration Day final yr, the web site noticed a spike in registrations, although the scale of that spike is commonly exaggerated. (No, she didn’t single-handedly trigger greater than 35,000 individuals to register.) However there’s a distinction between getting individuals to fill out a brief kind on-line and getting them to the polls, not to mention getting them to vote your means.
A extra lifelike take a look at Swift’s doubtless influence got here late final month, when a Newsweek survey discovered that 18 p.c of voters say they’re extra more likely to vote for a candidate endorsed by Swift—and 17 p.c are much less more likely to vote for somebody she endorses. That one-point hole was nicely throughout the margin of error, so that you shouldn’t rely on it to tip Georgia into Biden’s arms. I don’t need to inform the Illuminati the right way to do their job, however certainly there are higher causes to rig the Tremendous Bowl than that.
