(Note: The balance of this piece was published as a Facebook status first.)
People are free to like what they like, and not like stuff they don’t. And this includes Taylor Swift. Me personally? I love her music. But I have to object personally to the idea that her target audience is women and girls. I’m neither one of those things. And even if it were true, the men I associate with genuinely like and admire women and girls. We should be as offended by the idea that women are odd, or so different than men that never the twain shall meet, as we are that all men are violent monsters.
Anyway, I remember hearing Taylor at 16 on the radio giving an interview. Her first song “Tim McGraw” had just come out. The interviewer asked her who she wanted to write songs with. She said Craig Wiseman. That dude has some serious credits to his name, including helping Phil Vassar write his self-titled debut in 2000. And I can remember thinking, “This kid is gonna be huge.”
Right now, she’s the biggest draw in popular music, but fundamentally, she’s a songwriter. Yet she’s incredibly savvy. She understands the need for hits, but she has built her incredibly loyal following with introspective stories and vulnerability. A girl named after James Taylor had better know something about writing a song.
She’s helped me understand my own feelings and experiences. I couldn’t possibly agree that she’s the “apotheosis of mediocrity.” To me, that’s just sour grapes. It tells me that even an innovator who can bang on about “selling out” longs to be in the same spotlight.
The criticism of Swift quoted here comes from noted musician and producer Todd Rundgren, who originally wrote the song “Love Is The Answer” made famous by England Dan and John Ford Coley in 1979 and produced the experimental Daryl Hall and John Oates LP, War Babies, in 1974.
The work of music criticism—like film criticism—probably has an inevitably adversarial relationship with popular audiences. What is legitimately innovative is not always popular; what is popular is not always innovative. Frankly though, the only people in American popular music more popular with audiences than Taylor Swift are the Beatles, Michael Jackson, and Elvis Presley. It’s hard to be too upset at anyone for giving the audience what they want. And in her defense also, she’s often been the one to convince the audience that they want what she makes for them to hear. I have personally experienced a re-evaluation of her music with the passage of time, in a way quite similar to how popular success caused a re-evaluation of earlier work for Daryl Hall and John Oates in 1976, dating back to 1972. The LP H2O released in 1982 caused a positive re-evaluation of their work in the late 1970s. Todd Rundgren doesn’t have to like Taylor Swift, any more than I have to like the Backstreet Boys. But in a business made by audiences, in a real sense, the audience—the customer—is always right.
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