![]() ![]() Rowling of pop music, singing songs for 13-year-olds that are also irresistible to their mothers, Beyoncé the Oprah or the Whitney Houston who instead of marrying Bobby Brown married President Obama. Taylor's gift is for apparent approachability, Beyoncé's for apparent perfection. Taylor makes a show of singing along with other artists at awards shows, Beyoncé of going on last and reminding other artists of her preeminence. Taylor cultivates famous friendships, Beyoncé the loyalty of those who knew her when. Yes, Taylor is cheerily confessional, Beyoncé aerobically organized. Far from being the Beatles and Stones of the age not only when the medium is the message but also the streaming service is the song, they are the performers who demonstrate that all paths lead to the same place: the world divided between them and everybody else, whom they invite to applaud their triumph. Faced with powerlessness, the last pop stars are making music as a means of gaining and keeping power, with Taylor Swift and Beyoncé Knowles the most powerful among them. But the Tidal press conference, with its Apalachin overtones, served as yet another reminder that the world of pop exists now to be consolidated and carved up in the guise of cooperation. Tay and Bey: In many ways, they couldn't seem more different in many ways, they appear to embody the opposing principles that have always energized pop music, with Taylor playing the Apollonian counterweight to Beyoncé's Dionysian force. Taylor Swift wasn't there, but she showed up in the postevent coverage anyway, as her decision to pull her music from Spotify was identified as a precipitating force behind the Tidal rollout. Does anyone remember any actual songs from Madonna's or Coldplay's or Jack White's last album? No-but they remember Madonna, Chris Martin, and Jack White, and they were all on hand to extol their new platform, along with Alicia Keys, Rihanna, Usher, Kanye West, Nicki Minaj, Calvin Harris, Daft Punk, and, of course, Queen Bey. With their product radically devalued by the very technology employed to disseminate it and their music marginalized and pushed into the background by its very ubiquity, they responded by asserting their stardom, sort of like actors and actresses in the heyday of the studio system. There was something dystopian about it, as the biggest stars in what's left of the music business trotted onstage to announce their participation in Jay Z's venture and ended up looking like contestants on a celebrity edition of Survivor. It's just that I've been thinking of "The Beygency"-the brilliant Saturday Night Live skit that demonstrates Beyoncé's cultural preeminence is actually a matter of collective surrender-ever since I saw the press conference unveiling Jay Z's recently acquired streaming music service, Tidal. It doesn't matter that I'm just one listener outside of her generational demographic. Who cares how many times I listen to "Check on It"? It does. It has gamed the system so that the system puts #1s at number one in my own personal countdown. The Beygency is real, man, and it has rejiggered the supposedly inviolate iTunes algorithm. I have no memory of "Check on It" what's more, I have no memory of ever playing "Check on It." I don't even like "Check on It," and yet a forensic excavation of my laptop would suggest that I'm obsessed with it. But iTunes recorded me playing "Check on It" for the last time on Julyġ3, 2007-and 386 times in the year and a half before that. Sure, I like "Independent Women" well enough, and my daughter, when she was young, liked it even more. I've played them five times more than their closest competitor, Del Shannon's "Runaway." They are-they must be, by many multiples-my favorite songs.Įxcept that they're not. But I've played "Independent Women" and "Check on It" eight times more than Genesis's "Carpet Crawlers," the first song I bought on iTunes, back in 2003, and ten times more than "Cold Cold Ground," by Tom Waits, the second. I have about 25,000 songs on my computer and play them mostly on shuffle, which means that the songs I've played the most are the songs that have been on my computer the longest. Since then, according to iTunes, I have played "Independent Women" 399 times and "Check on It" 387. The first was a Destiny's Child song, "Independent Women Part 1," and the second was "Check on It," credited solely to Beyoncé, with a guest appearance by Slim Thug. On the 21st day of 2006, I bought two songs from the album #1s, by Destiny's Child, on iTunes. ![]()
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