A Few Thoughts on Taylor Swift (Steve's Version)

Okay, I may regret this -- no death threats, please -- but as a responsible journalist I feel I can't put it off any longer.

So here's the thing: I liked everything about Taylor Swift -- her attitude, her politics, her work ethic --EXCEPT her recorded output, i.e. her songs and albums.

And I didn't know why that is.

Weird, right? And, adding insult to confusion, lately that inability to get behind La Swift has really been bugging me.

Until, however, last week, when a couple of things popped up on the intertubes (or went viral, or became memes, or however the youngsters categorize the phenomenon) and I finally figured out what it was about Taylor that I didn't dig.

Here's exhibit A -- a knife-turning (yet clearly affectionate) parody of the 21st century's biggest pop phenomenon by somebody who's actually a huge fan.

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Pretty hilarious, for sure, but it started me to thinking. At which point the following piece in the New Yorker by Sinéad O’Sullivan appeared to my wondering eyes. (Sorry, I can't give you a link to the entire thing, but it's behind a paywall and you'll get the idea from this excerpt anyway).

Ask music critics what they think of Taylor Swift’s eleventh studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, and those who aren’t afraid of getting doxed might say something about the interminable length, the repetitive synth overlays, or the uninspired lyrics. Take “imgonnagetyouback,” a track that’s notably similar to Olivia Rodrigo’s “Get Him Back!”. In the chorus, Swift sings that she hasn’t yet decided “whether I’m gonna be your wife or gonna smash up your bike.” Perhaps the lyric is meant to be somewhat infantile, but even the most novice editor should have pushed Swift toward the more obvious rhyme: “whether I’m gonna be your wife or gonna smash up your life.”

Ask a Swiftie what they think of the album, though, and they may very well say that it’s her best work yet. Yes, it would have made more sense for her to rhyme “wife” with “life” in “imgonnagetyouback.” But Swift obsessives know to connect “imgonnagetyouback” with “Fallingforyou,” a song by The 1975 that was written by Swift’s ex-boyfriend Matty Healy. In it, Healy sings, “I’m so excited for the night/ All we need’s my bike and your enormous house.” Swift’s mention of a bike, in “imgonnagetyouback,” is therefore an intentional creative decision, like the lack of spaces in the song’s title. Some fans have gone even further, claiming that the lack of spaces not only invites a comparison to “Fallingforyou” but to Swift’s own “Blank Space,” a song on her 1989 album. (1975, 1989—there are a lot of years to keep track of here.)

“In Blank Space music video, Taylor Swift is smashing things and sings ‘Cause you know I love the players And you love the game’” a YouTube user called Miranda-ry9tf writes in a comment. “In 'imgonnagetyouback' she says ‘We broke all the pieces, but you still wanna play the game.’ Perhaps “Blank Space,” released in 2014, was about Healy, too? Those Swifties who have gone far down the rabbit hole might argue that Swift, by leaving out the spaces in her new song’s title, has created a kind of ouroboros — - a running theme in the artist’s work since 2016, when Kim Kardashian referred to her as a “snake.” If you write the words “imgonnagetyouback” in a circle, you’ll notice that the “k” and “im” are right next to each other. This might seem like a reach, but -- six tracks later -- Swift mentions a mysterious rival named Aimee, on a song titled “thanK you aIMee.” It doesn’t take a Swiftie to figure out whose name the capital letters spell.

Alrighty, then. So how is all this stuff relevant to my lack of enthusiasm for the music?

Well, for starters, as should be obvious from the video above, it's way too easy to parody Swift, which is a bad sign from jump.

I mean, I love the line in the take-off about how singing fast is the closest Taylor ever gets to rapping. But the larger point being made there is that her songwriting and record-making can be reduced to their basic level -- which is to say a shtick -- in an instant.

C'mon, really; can you even imagine the work of any previous comparably important pop auteur -- The Beatles, Dylan, Joni Mitchell -- being distilled to a few cliche predictable gestures like that?

Okay, Joni Mitchell maybe. But otherwise, I think not.

As for the rest of it, and this is my real problem with Swiftiana -- we're obviously talking about somebody whose major talents come down to mad marketing skills. Period, end of story, and sorry.

Forget the depressingly anonymous cookie-cutter-unimaginative instrumental backings that decorate the whole of her oeuvre, or the albums' numbingly endless cavalcade of relationship songs (does she write anything else?) that seem -- deliberately -- addressed after all this time solely to the concerns of 15-year-olds.

Forget all that and it's still clear that Swift's medium -- her aesthetic, if you will -- is essentially the equivalent of nothing more or less artistically valid than a Marvel Universe Superhero franchise.

Or, not to put to fine a point on it, something totally self-referential and uninteresting to anybody but rabid enthusiasts with unhealthily expansive attention spans. And let's just add that such a thing is NOT what I, at least, go to the movies/listen to pop music for. Or ever have.

Your mileage may vary, of course, and Swifties will doubtless disagree. Hey -- that's life in a corporate-dominated cultural environment.

But thank you for your attention in this regard in any case. And now excuse me -- I have to go find some out of the way hidey-hole to disappear into untill all this blows over.