Subjective and objective violence in Taylor Swift’s ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’

Using Slavoj Zizek’s binary of ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ violence, or the violence of resistance against power and imposition of power, this chapter addresses the idea that modernist music is more resistant to capitalism than pop music. The chapter shows that the attentive listening often demanded by modernist music, and seen as a strategy of capitalist resistance, has also become a marketable characteristic of recent pop music. This argument is fleshed out with an analysis of Taylor Swift’s 2012 song ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’.