JESSE WALKER: Taylor Swift Is Just the Latest Subject in a Long History of Pop Conspiracy Theories.

Conspiracy theories about the music industry come in many flavors. A century ago, to give one of the uglier examples, Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent claimed that a “Jewish combine” was suppressing gentile music and promoting jazz. “Popular music is a Jewish monopoly,” the paper declared in 1921. “Jazz is a Jewish creation. The mush, the slush, the sly suggestion, the abandoned sensuousness of sliding notes, are of Jewish origin.”

You didn’t have to be a Ford-style bigot to suspect that a cabal was behind the music you disliked. In 1958, Vance Packard—the author of The Hidden Persuaders, a best-selling attack on the advertising industry—testified to the U.S. Senate that “the public was manipulated into liking rock and roll” and that “the rock and roll, hillbilly, and Latin American movements were largely engineered, manipulated for the interests of the [music-licensing group] BMI.” When a Michigan senator objected that many of his constituents genuinely like hillbilly music, Packard agreeably replied, “I like some of it too, but I think the quality of it lately 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 using the Fab Four to induce “artificial neurosis” in the American child) and Gary Allen’s That Music: There’s More to It Than Meets the Ear (which speculated that the Beatles’ music was “put together by behavioral scientists in some ‘think tank’”).

Curiously, the magnum opus 2006 book Recording the Beatles is over 500 pages long, and there’s not one mention of those behavioral scientists in their think tank! (On the other hand, Oliver Stone just called and said, “Wake up, sheeple! That’s how deep the conspiracy goes…”)

On the other hand, given that Walker’s article is in the Atlantic, physicians, heal thy selves: Who Said It, Adolf Hitler or Taylor Swift?