Taylor Swift's VMA performance without autotune

Taylor Swift made her debut as a bona fide pop star last night at the MTV Video Music Awards where she performed her new single "Shake It Off." As the Internet is wont to do with pop stars, her vocals from that performance have now been isolated, so that you can listen to just her voice without the background music and backing vocals. You can listen to Swift sing without Auto-Tune in this post from Deadspin.

Understandably, Swift isn't perfect. She fails to hold every note on key, and her vocal ability is less than impressive. But Swift was also dancing and remembering choreography. She was in a loud venue where she could barely hear herself. That's not the most conducive environment for a stellar vocal performance. As we've pointed out before, pop queens don't need to sing, they just need to perform. And Swift certainly did that.

Haters gonna hate hate hate hate hate, it would seem.

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