Number Ones: Taylor Swift’s ‘Bad Blood’, The Fourth Single Syndrome, And The Pull Of Celebrity Beef

Does Taylor Swift’s latest version of ‘Bad Blood’ steal some moves from Katy Perry’s ‘E.T’? Bringing his popular column for The Vine to Junkee, Tim Byron takes a deeper look at the top song on the ARIA Singles Chart.

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Occasionally in pop music, an artist simply owns the charts. Everything they touch turns to gold, and the streets run red with the blood of those who dare criticise them. These are the rare situations where even the fourth single from an album goes to #1. And the last 12 months have very clearly been the time of Taylor Swift.

‘Bad Blood’ is her third #1 single in Australia in less than 12 months (after ‘Shake It Off’ and ‘Blank Space’). In the 31 weeks since her album 1989 was released, it’s only spent one week outside of the top 10.

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The Taylor vs Katy Plot Thickens: Why The ‘Bad Blood’ Single Echoes ‘E.T.’

Before it was a single, ‘Bad Blood’ was already kinda famous for allegedly being a diss of pop singer Katy Perry, who happens to be in a relationship with Taylor’s ex, John Mayer. (Swift refuses to discuss the person the song is about, but is more than happy to provide enough hints to let you join the dots.) Musically, ‘Bad Blood’ certainly has echoes of Katy Perry songs, more so than the rest of 1989. And let’s not forget that the Max Martin, who produced ‘Bad Blood’, is also the world expert on co-writing and producing Katy Perry hits.

What’s more, releasing a remix-with-a-rapper as the fourth single from the album is a move straight out of Katy Perry’s playbook. Perry released a long series of singles from her 2012 Teenage Dream album; the fourth single from the album was ‘E.T.’, a remixed version featuring a prominent guest rapper whose name starts with K: Kanye West. The video for ‘E.T.’ was — as you’d expect, given the lyrical themes of the song and Katy Perry’s big budget pop — high-production-value futuristic-looking stuff about Katy Perry falling in love with an alien.

Taylor Swift, too, is releasing a long series of singles from her 2014 1989 album. The fourth single from the album was ‘Bad Blood’, a remixed version featuring a prominent guest rapper whose name starts with K: Kendrick Lamar). The video for ‘Bad Blood’ was — as you’d expect, given the lyrical themes of the song and Taylor Swift’s big budget pop — high-production-value futuristic-looking stuff about Taylor Swift falling out with that chick who did ‘E.T.’.

These similarities between ‘Bad Blood’ and ‘E.T.’ are intentional. Some of them may even be deliberate parody. But it’s also a response to an industry reality: by the time you get to the fourth single off a big album, everyone who’s even vaguely paying attention has already made their mind up. So making a fourth single into a hit requires an injection of spectacle to reach people who have been hiding under rocks. The fourth single from Michael Jackson’s Thriller album, ‘Human Nature’, didn’t even reach the top 50 in Australia — but when Michael Jackson filmed a spectacular video for the fifth single from the album — the title track — it reached #4 in the Australian charts.

Which is exactly why the video for ‘Bad Blood’ is a spectacle, full of celebrity cameos and elaborate choreographed fight scenes.

And of course, even if you are as seemingly omnipresent as Taylor Swift or Katy Perry, it doesn’t hurt to try and broaden the fanbase. Swift’s sold 350,000 copies of the album in Australia — a massive pile of albums, these days — but she’s still only reached a dismal 1-2% of the population. A few cosmetic changes might make for a product that could get through to some of the 98% of people who didn’t buy it. Thus the guest rapper, the big beats, and the cinematic Kill Bill-style video — it’s a big modern-sounding hybrid, with a bit more hip-hop in it. And it just might appeal to pop fans who weren’t convinced by, say, the preciousness of ‘Blank Space’. You will be assimilated.

Kendrick Lamar Sounds Kinda Bored

In 2015, Kendrick Lamar is perfect for the role of ‘guest rapper in a Taylor Swift remix single’ (or ‘Welvin The Great’, as his character in the video is named).  Lamar is probably the most critically acclaimed hip-hop artist since Public Enemy; his album To Pimp A Butterfly (featuring the single ‘King Kunta’, below) is the single most critically acclaimed album of 2015 thus far. This year, he also became the first American rapper not called Eminem or Kanye to have a #1 album in Australia since 2008.

Taylor’s pop smarts, and Kendrick’s cred. Together! What could go wrong?

In truth, though, Kendrick’s rap on ‘Bad Blood’ isn’t his best work. Elsewhere, Kendrick has shown himself to be an imaginative and thought-provoking lyricist. He’s able to paint evocative pictures with his words, manipulating assonance and alliteration with the ease of a born poet, and he’s knowledgeable about context both inside and outside the hip-hop world. Of course, in his two verses of ‘Bad Blood’, you don’t get any sense that he gives a shit about being on a Taylor Swift song, let alone that he gives a shit about the context of Swift’s feud with Katy Perry. There’s some interesting rhythmic flow in his first verse (“I don’t hate you, but I hate to critique/over-rate you“) and some nice assonance in the repetition of the ‘ee-ahh’ vowel combo in the second verse (e.g., ‘need ya’, ‘procedure’, ‘amnesia’), but while his vocal tone is likely aiming for grim, he mostly sounds bored.

Presumably the limitations of doing a verse in a Taylor Swift song doesn’t give him much scope to put his own personality across; it’s very much Swift’s show, what with the big video with all her friends in it. It’s not quite the place for blistering verses, ‘The Blacker The Berry’-style, on the nature of racism. In any case, Kendrick Lamar, left to his own devices, seems more likely to critique the idea of pop singers engaging in a manufactured beef rather than to cheer Taylor Swift on.

The Fourth (And Fourth-Best) Single

In the end, ‘Bad Blood’ quite accurately is the fourth-best single on 1989. I mean, it’s got real pop hooks — that big drum beat, the melody when she sings the title phrase, those Riverdance-ish “hey!”s that punctuate lines here and there. But pretty much everything Max Martin’s ever touched has real pop hooks. There’s a few good lines, sure — most notably “bandaids don’t fix bulletholes/  you say sorry just for show” — but Taylor Swift is a lyricist with an ear for the striking line.

It doesn’t quite have the energy of ‘Shake It Off’, the melodic charm of ‘Blank Space’, or the sonic stylishness of ‘Style’ — but yeah, it’s alright. It’s a bit like most fourth singles from hit albums: it needs to be spruced up by celebrity and spectacle.

To parody the weirdness of fourth single syndrome, the ’90s Brisbane alternative band Regurgitator released their fourth single from the album Unit (‘The Song Formerly Known As’) under the sardonic title ‘The Fourth Single From Unit’. Other fourth singles from enormous hit albums: ‘You Learn’ by Alanis Morissette, ‘Turning Tables’ by Adele, ‘Man In The Mirror’ by Michael Jackson, and ‘LoveGame’ by Lady Gaga. There’s nothing embarrassing in those songs compared to the bigger hits, but they certainly don’t have the same spark.

The Gossip, Or Standing In The Way Of The Watercooler

Of course, the biggest hook in ‘Bad Blood’ isn’t the melody or the guitar tone or the drum beat. The biggest hook is the gossip. ‘Bad Blood’ is at #1 because the beef with Katy Perry gives the song an extra juiciness that’s lacking in the music itself.

And I wouldn’t put it past Swift (or Perry) to have entirely manufactured the beef. Swift is clearly a self-aware kind of pop star, with a sense of humour about her public persona (she’s been making fun of how the media portrays her since at least ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together‘). She’s also likely well-aware of the publicity value of getting her name in the gossip mags; as a pop star, it’s better to be talked about than not. And it’s better to deliberately set up the story than let the gossip mags create it themselves.

And Katy Perry is a pretty good person for Taylor Swift to have a beef with. They’re both well-known All-American white-girl pop stars with lots of hits, but there are some very clear differences in their public personae too. Katy Perry, a singer with a Christian-pop past, is a crass, sexed-up kind of pop star, in a very nudge-nudge wink-wink kind of way. She’s the kind of pop star who says, ‘Sure, great idea!’ when someone suggests she should have fireworks shoot out of her boobs in a video clip.

Swift’s persona, in contrast, is less focused on her body (in fact it took until early 2015 for her to reveal her belly button), and more on being ‘that girl hanging out with her friends bitching about her exes’. She’s definitely a more introverted pop star than Katy Perry. I suspect that Katy Perry actually has decent music taste in real life – she changed the spelling of ‘California Gurls’ to echo a Big Star song — but she’s happy to give the public what they want. In contrast, you get the sense that Taylor Swift does feel a personal affinity with her music; that it’s more a reflection of her particular tastes and life.

So I could imagine an early-2014 Skype call in which Swift called up Perry, told her the idea she had for a song called ‘Bad Blood’, and asked her if she was up for it. I suspect that Katy Perry would have found the idea of a manufactured beef hilarious; I get the impression that Perry is also more than aware of the absurdity of modern pop in all its pomp.

Watch out for the Regina George in sheep's clothing…

— KATY PERRY (@katyperry) September 9, 2014

And being dissed works for Katy Perry too. If Katy Perry has a reply song in the works, it will get a fair chunk more publicity than the average Katy Perry song — a pretty useful thing in the modern attention economy. She get bonus points if the reply song is co-written and produced by Max Martin, featuring some of the more distinctive sounds on ‘Style’ or ‘Shake It Off’ — and it’s jackpot if there’s a guitar solo by John Mayer. And the public laps this stuff up; Australia is a country, after all, where Frankee’s ‘F.U.R.B.’ spent almost as long at #1 as Eamon’s ‘Fuck It (I Don’t Want You Back)’.

So why all the gossip? We humans are, of course, social animals. Evolutionary biologists have found that there’s a correlation, in general, between a species’ brain size and how complex their social systems are. Because we live in societies where connections and alliances and networking are more important than brute strength, we need our big brains to get ahead.

So it’s probably inevitable that a social animal ends up gossiping. Gossip is a way to maintain ties; a way to keep up with the complex dynamics of a group. It’s not just for women-targeted gossip mags, either: I avidly follow Formula 1, and the almost-entirely-masculine Formula 1 world is just as full of gossip as the trashy mags — ‘OMG! Lewis Hamilton is pissed because Hamilton’s team screwed up at Monaco.’

And, of course, celebrities are eminently suitable gossip fodder. You probably don’t have to explain who Taylor Swift is to your mate at work. And unlike someone you actually know, Taylor Swift is not going to get the shits with you if you start talking about her behind her back. Gossip allows us to pick sides, to divide ourselves into us and them in a relatively harmless way. These kind of people like Taylor Swift; those kind of people prefer Katy Perry.

Personally, I’m the kind of person who prefers the second singles from albums. They’re not trying too hard the way the first single does, but they’re still pretty strong. Think ‘Blank Space’ or ‘Teenage Dream’ — they both nail it. Of course, there are definitely exceptions to the rule — that fourth single from Unit was arguably the best song of Regurgitator’s career. But as far as fourth singles go, ‘Bad Blood’ breaks even.

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Tim Byron completed a PhD in music psychology, plays in too many bands, and chronically overanalyses everything musical. He has written for Max TV, Mess+Noise, The Guardian, The Big Issue, and The Vine.

You can find the rest of his Number Ones column here.