In the fall of 2012, Taylor Swift released Red. Her ambitions had outgrown Nashville, and so began a delicate dance: moving toward pop without rejecting the country audience that made her famous.
She went for it with her third single on that record, “I Knew You Were Trouble.” Co-written with Max Martin and Shellback, it is not a country song: Its chorus crashes into a distorted synth bass drop from Native Instruments’ “Massive” software synthesizer with programmed drums; the vocals run through distortion, compression, pitch correction, reverb and delay. In fact, the song shared a lot of DNA with Martin’s precision-engineered boy-band-pop, and fans ate it up: “I Knew” hit No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100.
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And how did the music community react to the technology that took Swift from the Bluebird Cafe to Nissan Stadium? Nobody cared. No synthesizer backlash. No campaign to warn listeners that her voice had been processed. No demand that the song be labeled “electronically assisted music.”
Three decades earlier, the reaction was very different. In May 1982, the Central London branch of the UK Musicians’ Union passed a motion to ban synthesizers and drum machines, fearing machines would take work from working musicians (sound familiar?). American unions later fought the “virtual orchestras” threatening Broadway pit musicians.
