the ask@AAR: How are Taylor Swift and Romance Alike?
warning: today’s ask is more of a rant than a question
Taylor Swift’s first album came out when my daughter was ten. We both loved it–I still get a catch in my heart when I listen to Tim McGraw and Mary’s Song–and played it again and again on the way to school much to the dismay of her twin brother. As Taylor continued to release albums, I continued listen but, by the time my daughter was in her early teens, Taylor wasn’t cool. (I suspect my daughter still listened to her but on headphones where musical tastes aren’t public.) Like her three brothers, she listened to Eminem, Jay Z, Snoop, Kendrick, and other men (Rihanna was the exception). The songs we now heard in the car were those about bitches, hos, guns, and pain. Love songs… not so much.
Taylor’s music, which has always been about love and relationships, was for years ignored or condescend to by the mainstream music critics–the first article Rolling Stone wrote about her in 2008 had the headline Best of Rock 2008: Best Country Lolita. They called her music poppy country and quoted her as saying she just wrote about boys. In her first ever mention in the New York Times, rock critic Kelefa Sanneh said Tim McGraw was a lightweight ode to seasonal love.
These days critics take Taylor seriously–the woman has sold over 200 million albums, won Album of the Year three times, was named Artist of the 2010s Decade by the American Music Awards, and is one of the top ten streaming artists of all time. Even though she’s still singing love songs. Even better, my daughter now listens again to her with no fear of shaming. Her twin brother even has a favorite Taylor album: 1989. (That’s mine too. And, yes, I’ve watched this video more times than I can count.)
Early Taylor is like romance: a victim of the patriarchy’s obsession with male stories of violence, pain, the big bucks, and misogyny. One could say that Netflix’s Bridgerton is romance’s equivalent of Taylor’s 1989, her first album that critics gave her work the credit it is due. Just as the NYT is now reviewing romance, hip music critics have spilled a thousand rivulets of ink on Taylor’s remakes of her original work, lauding her for her feminism in taking back her work, and marveling at the songwriting artistry in Red that they’d dissed in 2012.
Great romance, like a great Taylor Swift song, shows us the emotional and relational aspects of life. Unlike Jake Gyllenhaal, I’m a big fan of both. I am always here for women’s stories, the louder and more emotional the better. Here’s to love stories, sung or read, and to celebrating those who tell them.
And if you haven’t seen this video, it is the bomb.
Setting aside her music for a moment, Taylor Swift has demonstrated that she is a tremendously resilient and strong woman. She has had very public disappointments and criticisms, as well as her own personal struggles dealing with the stress of stardom, perfectionism and an eating disorder. Yet she keeps bouncing back, keeps claiming her music and her life and yes, even her romance, for herself. I hope “Taylor’s Version” of all her songs does better than the originals so she can get maximum royalties for her own work.
Taylor doesn’t have much of a singing voice but she sure can sell the emotion of the lyrics. Watching her sing live is a bit like seeing someone belting out karaoke and to hell with what anyone thinks! But I like the distinctly country sound to her voice and the fact that songs like this tell a story. Compared to most of the ‘cool’ music today, her stuff is the musical equivalent of great literature….
I love this new recording of “Nothing New” with Phoebe Bridgers. NYT did a little write up of it and had this to say:
“Nothing New” is much darker in tone and more sharply critical of a culture that moves from one young ingénue to the next: “How can a person know everything at 18 but nothing at 22?” Swift asks, foreshadowing some of the themes she’d explore on her 2020 album “Folklore.” Most striking, though, is the bridge, in which she imagines meeting the Eve Harrington to her Margo Channing, a predecessor with “the kind of radiance you only have at 17.” It’s hard not to picture the longtime Swiftie Olivia Rodrigo (“She’ll know the way and then she’ll say she got the map from me”), who seems to have fulfilled this prophecy to a T. But in the time that has passed from when Swift wrote this song to when she finally recorded it, the mournful “Nothing New” has transformed into something triumphant: It’s proof that Swift has outlasted her novelty and stuck around longer than her detractors imagined.”
I’m a fan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3fWCRvz5JA
This is a great article as well:
https://slate.com/culture/2021/11/taylor-swift-red-taylors-version-review.html
Calling a talented young woman a “Lolita”? Ugh! One would have hoped Rolling Stone had moved on from its obsession with the sexual/non-musical lives of female singers after they were roundly criticized in the mid-1970s for dubbing Joni Mitchell (who I would claim as the Boomer generation’s Taylor Swift) “old lady of the year” because of her numerous love affairs, but I see the misogyny and frat-boy attitude is still alive and well there. Sigh.
I’m not too familiar with Swift’s music—other than “Shake It Off,” which I love—but she’s another in a long list of female artists who aren’t given enough mainstream credit for everything she’s accomplished because she doesn’t conform to male fantasies of what a woman should be/do (unlike, say, Amy Winehouse who fulfills all those dark fantasies about excess and women being unable to handle fame). I stand by my contention that Taylor Swift has a lot in common with Joni Mitchell (also an incredibly talented singer-songwriter) in that neither of them play into the male conventions & cliches of what should happen to female artists.
Somewhat o/t, but my 23-year-old daughter was recently driving me somewhere and, when she started her car, the first song that popped up on the Bluetooth was something from Megan Thee Stallion’s “Hottie Sauce.” She quickly flipped to another song and said, “It’s probably best that you don’t listen to that, Mom,” to which I responded, “You know most of my reading is romance, right? There’s nothing Megan is singing about that I haven’t read there before.”
Unabashed Taylor Swift fan here! I had the same experience as you, Dabney, where my daughter loved her then it wasn’t cool to like her and now the tides are turning again (my daughter is a college junior now). I like Taylor’s country music the best and my favorite of her albums is Red – I feel it tells a complete story and I love the hope in the last song. Taylor got criticized a lot for not having the strongest voice but she was always acknowledged for her songwriting skills and they are impressive. I think she has written or co-written all the songs on her albums. I don’t see anything wrong with writing numerous albums about love and relationships. Frankly, the entire romance genre is looked down upon for the same reason but why shouldn’t Taylor (song)write what she knows? Another reason I like her is that she works hard. She engages with her fans a lot and if you have ever been to one of her concerts, you know that she puts on a damn good show – you really get your money’s worth! She also makes great music videos. I also love the one for Wildest Dreams (Scott Eastwood!) as well as the recent short film All Too Well and so many others. If you haven’t seen it, her documentary Miss Americana is really engaging and a good look at what she’s gone through and how she has grown over the years – something really hard to do when you have been in the public eye since you were a teenager. I haven’t liked her most recent 2 albums as well as her prior ones but kudos to her for trying new things! I just got her re-recorded version of Red and am excited for the bonus album that comes with it – it will be lovely to get some “new” country music from her. My daughter texted me that she loves it!