Taylor Swift’s popularity reflects a decline in society.
The Rise of ‘Me Music’
After Tayor Swift’s massive “Eras” tour is packing stadiums to the point her shows are causing earthquakes (even though bad seats are often going for $1,000 or more), Swift isn’t just resuscitating the post-Covid live music industry, she’s threatening to help rescue America’s flagging theater business.
It was recently announced that she struck a deal with AMC theaters to show a three-hour concert film from her smash tour for the millions of people who couldn’t get tickets. It starts showing in October, AMC is charging higher ticket prices than normal — which are already absurd — and the presale figures for the movie tickets are already breaking records. Based on some back-of-the-envelope math gleaned from some speculative news reports, Swift might make something close to half a billion dollars off this tour and all the related revenue.
And it’s not just that Swift has conquered the unwashed masses, America’s elite tastemakers have also become unrepentant Swifties. This summer, The New York Times covered Swift with an enthusiastic zeal not reserved for any other figure since maybe Obama — even going so far as to publish a distasteful meditation on internet randos’ lesbian fantasies about her.
Most recently, The New Yorker issued its high-toned blessing by publishing a remarkable essay, “Listening to Taylor Swift in Prison: Her music makes me feel that I’m still part of the world I left behind.” There was a time when we imagined that everyone in the prison yard would stand around overwhelmed by the sheer emotion and elevation of the soul produced by hearing “Sull’aria” from Mozart’s Le Nozze Di Figaro, even though they had no idea what those two Italian ladies were singing about. But if “Blank Space” is what you’ve got on the cheap commissary radio to help you count the days, I’m not going to begrudge you.
Still, someone who truly, deeply cares about the state of popular music has to stand athwart Taylor Swift, yelling “what is this @#?!,” and it might as well be an intellectually dyspeptic Gen X guy with nothing to lose.
To be clear, I’m not so hostile or out of touch that I don’t get important aspects of her appeal. I think she’s worth paying attention to because something about Swift resonates at the frequency of America. But I’m genuinely not sure her popularity is a testament to her talent, and I can’t think of another major post-WWII music figure I’m honestly this conflicted about estimating their gifts. Swift is a phenomenal marketer, she works very hard, and from what I can tell, almost no one at her level cares about her fans and reaching out to them personally the way Swift does.
The Soft Bigotry of Low Musical Expectations
Further, while a lot of positive developments came out of the internet destroying the cabal of corporate music executives and radio programmers that previously controlled popular tastes, we’re now coming to terms with how resulting fragmentation has been detrimental to society. We hardly have anything in the way of a shared common culture, so people tend to cling to anything that breaks through the din and consolidates any pop culture support like it’s some kind of life raft. Music has the power to connect people through shared experience, and people desperately want that connection in this polarizing age.
In the case of Swift, however, that connection has to be interpreted, like everything else these days, through a political lens. Thus New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg declares, “After years of Covid isolation, reactionary politics and a mental health crisis that has hit girls and young women particularly hard, there’s a palpable longing for both communal delight and catharsis.” While there’s some truth in this observation, I regret to inform Goldberg that Swift’s fanbase is so massive that a huge part of it agrees with the reactionary politics New York Times readers seem to deplore.
The best pop stars simply transcend pedestrian political concerns, explaining Swift’s appeal doesn’t have to be done through the lens of feminism. Six years ago — long before, say, the Dobbs decision or the New Right writing essays about “The Longhouse” — I observed after Tom Petty’s death, “a huge swath of America, across beliefs, cultures, generations, and races, would want to claim Tom Petty’s music and feel some solidarity in his loss. We need unifying cultural figures and artists now more than ever.” Petty was obviously very masculine and a baby boomer, but his massive appeal over several decades — at the time of his death, one out of every 40 songs played on classic rock radio was Tom Petty — and Swift’s appeal are both born of a universal desire for human connection.
What has changed is the overall cultural milieu that produced Swift, compared to popstars of previous generations and how they reflect changing values. Ironically enough, Tom Wolfe coined the phrase “the Me decade” to refer to the 1970s when artists such as Tom Petty rose to stardom. The idea was Americans were starting to move away from having an identity rooted in community and moving toward atomization — and certainly, a big part of that development was the ability for individuals to find meaning in outside local communities and identify with distant pop culture figures whose identity and branding were created by relatively new mass media technologies.
But this development, however startling it was to astute critics such as Wolfe, was embryonic 50 years ago. With Taylor Swift we see it in full flower; maybe it took 30-some years, but the cultural trends that emerged from the ’70s finally produced an artist almost wholly dedicated to “Me Music.” This finally brings me to my actual gripe, the specifics of why and how her music sucks: It’s utterly defined by self-obsession rather than introspection. Where other artists will occasionally do a Christmas album, it seems like every Taylor Swift album is a Festivus record devoted to the airing of grievances and feats of artistic strength.
To that end, she has almost wholly pioneered a new genre of what an acquaintance of mine calls the “bellyaching about a boyfriend” song. It’s true that young men are frequently terrible to young women and there’s nothing inherently wrong with this being fodder for pop songs, but there are limits. There’s yet another song on her latest record bashing one of her famous exes, John Mayer, following up on her infamous breakup song “Dear John” in 2010. Look, everyone knows Mayer was a terrible womanizer — but this was known before he dated her — and that was 14 YEARS AGO. Whether he’s fully atoned or not, the guy has since gotten sober and moved to Montana or whatever. It’s, as the kids say, pretty cringe to still be exploiting these past relationships, which considering Swift’s had a charmed life since she was a teenager, seem like pretty hollow examples of genuine heartbreak.
Aside from generally objectionable thematic content, it’s also true that a great many of her lyrics are just so forced as to be terrible. In “Anti-Hero” she sings, “Did you hear my covert narcissism/I disguise as altruism/Like some kind of congressman?” which hangs in the Louvre of lyrics where I audibly groaned the first time I heard it (though it’s a bit further down the hall from the place of honor occupied by “Hike up your skirt and show your world to me”). Aside from the clunker of a reference to congressmen, it’s just adorable she thinks her narcissism is “covert,” but since this is what passes for self-reflection coming from Swift, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
Still, I know enough Swifties whose judgment I respect, and they insist she is a talented lyricist. When pressed for an example of said talent, one suggested this lyric from “All Too Well” of the Red album: “And you call me up again just to break me like a promise/So casually cruel in the name of being honest.” And you know what… that’s a pretty good lyric!
But in context, “All Too Well” is just another breakup song, and some of the lyrics demonstrate a degree of obliviousness that’s concerning: “
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