I Hate Taylor Swift Discourse

And why this says a lot about what music criticism has turned into.

Artwork by @saddrawingsbyjace

---

Everything I have ever learned about Taylor Swift has been against my will. She has forged herself into a cultural monolith, somehow immortal. If the world ended tomorrow, she would still exist. For better and worse, it has never been easier to listen to people talk about Taylor Swift. Some of it is a result of her private jet tours blasting bubblegum break-up songs into every crevice of the planet; a lot of it just a reflection of the fact that it has never been easier to hear people talking about anything. But if you are going to participate in Taylor Swift Discourse, it helps to approach it with the mentality that both viscerally loving and hating Taylor Swift is for normies. There are a lot of ways to get lost, and it is very loud out there, and you do not want to find yourself trapped in a blind alley, nodding along to the back third of Ben Shapiro’s 17-minute video dunking on her latest album.

I spent two hours of my Sunday morning mainlining both discs of The Tortured Poet’s Department: The Anthology on vinyl because my Swiftie girlfriend pinned me down to the couch and wouldn’t leave me alone until I indulged in her obsession I am a caring and supportive boyfriend. A decent chunk of the album is a tedious slog of high-school poetry read over tired washed-out 80s synth, a self-parody of what she set out to do with Midnights, a flatline of indiscernible moody nothing. It feels like K-Mart Lana. A significant portion of the TTPD’s lyrical content is dedicated to Matty Healy, a guy she was with for about five weeks, but I suppose no woman forgets her first racist boyfriend. We are dealing with a pop star whose most famous songs are all about breakups and ex-boyfriends, and a significant portion of the news about Taylor Swift is concerned with who she is dating right now.

There seems to be a certain blankness to Taylor Swift, that she is a synthetic product made in a sterile lab that makes focus-group-approved musical Wonder Bread for the middle of the bell curve. She would be into a golden retriever type of guy. She strikes me as a Disney princess for adult women who can’t even with adulting. I imagine the statistical mean of a Swiftie is a woman who somehow seems like she’d give toothy head even as she radiates asexuality. Taylor Swift is Elon Musk for women.

The Taylor Swift appeal isn’t very difficult to discern. She provides instant musical gratification, speaking to the basic desires and fantasies of both psychotic teenagers and wine moms. Her repertoire is loaded with break-up songs and fame songs and childhood songs and performative victimhood songs and especially the ex-obsessed, forever-holding-a-grudge, I’ve-never-done-anything-wrong-in-my-life-it-was-their-fault songs. She connects to these feelings in a maximally direct and uncomplicated way, and even her vocal annunciation is precise and straightforward, leaving no room for misinterpretation. The song about her breakup with John Mayer is literally titled “Dear John.” The track “Mean” addresses a vague, faceless hater, and the bridge contains the lyrics: “All you’ll ever be in life is mean. And a liar! And pathetic! And alone in life and mean!” Her songs are horoscopes, both vague enough and specific enough with a touch of allegory and imagery and autobiography. The simplicity has never changed—her latest albums Midnights and The Tortured Poets Department are no more mysterious than Speak Now or Red; they just describe a woman in her 30s rather than her teens. This is the same reason why aging millennials still love Harry Potter.

Actual lyrics from “I Hate It Here.”

In a moment that seems to be hurting for bright spots, truthfully, I don’t give a shit if people enjoy her music. When my girlfriend secured floor seats to the Eras Tour show in Toronto for *only* $600 (tickets for her section are currently listed at $5,700), she was so overwhelmed with joy and anticipation that she bawled for roughly six consecutive months after receiving the confirmation email from Ticketmaster. As a music fan and someone who attends a financially unhealthy number of concerts every year, I’m genuinely happy that she will undergo a defining and life-altering experience when she sees Taylor Swift perform live for the first time.

There is plenty of music out there that just isn’t for me and that’s fine; hating on anything so deeply is bound to cause some form of mental illness. My issue is not with Taylor Swift’s music but with Taylor Swift Fandom and all the celebrity worship and brainless backlash it produces. We have allowed the human equivalent of Deloitte to occupy the formless void of current events, a dim celestial body for parasocial addicts to admire from afar. A pop star’s fame and residual staying power will continue to propel them for some distance, and at surprising speed, long after the discovery that the engine that’s supposed to be spinning those turbines is somehow just absolutely stuffed with ham. Having strong emotions toward her music and her celebrity is a truly lowbrow pineapple-on-pizza internet topic (because it’s middlebrow to bring up Joan Didion, while the highbrow flex is discussing Ágota Kristóf).

The superheated online arguments over Taylor Swift have somehow managed to become more grating than Israel-Palestine posting. I keep seeing Swifties defend the lyrics of TTPH with an argument like, “you’re just not intelligent enough to understand her lyrics,” which is literally the Rick and Morty copypasta. Yesterday, I saw someone on Instagram post, “Very few in history have commanded the English language like her,” which is an insane thing to say about someone servicing pop music at Amazon volume; it’s statistically impossible to be a sophisticated writer and appeal to hundreds of millions of people in the same way that McDonald’s couldn’t sell A5 Wagyu burgers. Many of her devotees fall under the brand of person who has glommed onto a hazy mainstream narrative, and they genuinely can’t make sense of anyone challenging it: Taylor Swift is both a tortured victim and a billionaire artist whose live performances juice economies and prompt leaders of nations to beg her to visit their lands. Any attempt to untangle this contradiction for them is a losing proposition. If anything, trying to “red pill” anyone in 2024 is inherently corny. There’s also a growing cohort of music fans who are less enamored with mainstream music, but they’re replacing poptimism with a hodgepodge of aggressively stupid anti-woke stances that are so shoehorned into their assessments, their ability to engage with art is severely compromised and demented.

People like Taylor Swift have always existed. However, there is a difference between enjoying her music for her vocal performance or narrative or melodies and obsessively parsing through her lyrics for decades-old references to her dating life like it’s the convoluted plot of the 20th Star Wars sequel because you are irreparably entrenched in the Taylorverse. The Tortured Poet’s Department certainly appeals to the latter.

As if this album cycle wasn’t tiring and aggravating enough, the endless gush of rave reviews for TTPD is another indicator of how music journalism has morphed into glorified PR for major labels and pop stars. It seems like Taylor and everyone on her production and marketing teams feel like she is too big to fail and she can release anything and her hardcore fans will buy millions of her records and it will make waves. And maybe their right. The hype-machine roars at jet engine volume, infusing political valence and social significance into any contemporary mainstream music irrespective of how mid it is, insisting that Taylor Swift is Doing Something Important because she is this generation’s Bob Dylan or whatever. Any review from Rolling Stone or NME or a similar outlet is just glazin’ at this point—Taylor Swift’s newest album is her best album since her last album, which was her best album since the one before that, and anyhow, they’re all five-star instant classics. Folklore is a perfectly enjoyable folk-pop record, but the only way it could be perceived as worthy of such universal and unquestioning acclaim is if the listener is completely ignorant of any other folk music.

For all the ways in which music criticism is hyperbolic, distasteful, and a threat to even the most cosmetic and vestigial sense of integrity in journalism, it is also important to remember that it also sucks. All these major music publications have sold out any discerning taste for hoovering cheap clicks from massive fan bases who just want to be reassured they have great taste in music because they like what’s popular. It is no coincidence that every year, 20 different music reviewers highly rate the same 20 albums, and each publication’s year-end best-of lists are those same 20 albums reshuffled into a slightly different ranking.

Above and beyond the risks this dynamic presents across the full spectrum, from institutions to individuals, there is also the risk it presents to watching or listening or talking about or thinking about music, which is to make everything greasier and cheesier and more insufferable in its overall experience. The music press also treats Beyoncé with such earnest po-faced seriousness, and it is uncertain whether it’s because she is perceived to be the last vestige of the post-Pitchfork poptimist woke-capital monoculture that these journos tried to manifest into reality, or if it is more simply a marketing gimmick. I’m not sure how an album full of tepid overproduced country covers has “something to say about America” unless these writers genuinely believe that reckoning with white supremacy begins and ends with Taking Black Art Seriously and Cowboy Carter is singlehandedly unerasing the contributions of Black country artists, which have been ignored for far too long by fans of bro-country who disproportionately skew alt-right, and some white folks forget that before Beyoncé was Queen Bey, she was just a Black Girl From Da Dirty South, Y’all. Again, when Lemonade dropped, it was a fine album, but it had music critics starting to go on Patrick Bateman-tier rants about mass-produced pop music.

“Jolene” has been rewritten to be a badass bitch anthem instead of a feminine tragedy song in which Dolly Parton was awestruck by a red-headed bank clerk who was flirting with her newlywed husband. In the original, there’s a strong sense of desperation from the narrator because she is overcome with jealousy and fear that her husband will leave her for another woman, but she is torn because Jolene is so stunning. The beauty of the song lies in the ambiguity of whether Jolene is even trying to steal Dolly’s lover or if this entire ordeal is a product of her insecurities. Beyoncé’s version sounds like she is trying to deflect her husband’s infidelity while putting the other woman down. Some of the revised lyrics include, “Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene / I’m warnin' you, woman, find you your own man / Jolene, I know I’m a queen, Jolene / I’m still a Creole banjee bitch from Louisianne (Don't try me).” The song isn’t as nearly as #girlboss or confident as Beyoncé thinks it is—there is the same sense of desperation but with far less self-awareness.

At least Swifties recognize their rabid obsessions and code themselves as fandom psychos—anyone who deigns to criticize their heroin-with-an-E is meant with them hollering, “THIS WHOLE THING SMACKS OF GENDER!!” as they flip over their uncle’s grill and turn the 4th of July into the 4th of Shit. But the Beyoncé hype presents itself as some “mainstream conversation” that we’re all participating in by virtue of her singles making their way onto some Spotify in-house playlists. At this point, the music journos are huffing fumes. Beyoncé’s 2014 self-titled album seems to be the turning point in which the music industry went full poptimist and started to mostly ignore any type of guitar-based music for fear of being branded as out-of-touch rock purists. This sort of vibe-damage is not really the biggest hazard of inviting this particular vampire across the threshold, but it went on to generate a slew of reviews like: King PU$$Y Eater revolutionizes our perception of bodies and spaces with their hit single, “Goop on Ya Grinch” [7.6/10].

This has caused me to reflect on Pitchfork’s demise, and more specifically, how this creates an interesting litmus test for poptimism.

Option 1: Admit that voluntarily steering into poptimism was an editorial mistake because it rendered Pitchfork’s POV moot. Covering Taylor Swift and Beyoncé endlessly will eventually plunge your publication into an uninteresting and indistinguishable pop culture troth—even if you dress up that slop with the site’s patented verbosity.

Option 2: Admit Pitchfork was forced to pivot by editors to stay alive in a brutal business environment. The argument that this shift toward pretending pop music is high art to make up for past sins was all bullshit. No one actually believes the new Olivia Rodrigo album warrants a 2,000-word thinkpiece about feminism. And this tactic still failed.

The ability to be honest is tied to creative and economic independence. Many of the publications that cover Beyoncé and Taylor Swift operate on razor-thin margins, and the easiest way to survive seems to involve bending over to labels and pop stars at the height of their popularity. Negative reviews are blamed for flagging financial performance and many critics give up their backbones to avoid being viewed as unnecessarily harsh. How much of the overflow of gushing praise for Cowboy Carter was due to culture writers afraid of being labeled a racist for writing a dissenting opinion?

At some point, we have experienced an inversion, a shift from music being symptomatic of its time to music trying to shape its time. This isn’t completely unprecedented—for example, the 60s had plenty of anti-establishment and protest music. But something seems off here, a kind of spiritual malaise that’s actively repellent. Perhaps it’s because a lot of “woke” pop music is manufactured and the discourse around it feels inorganic and the tunes lack a connection to any sentiment on the ground, to any co-existing movement. There is also a specific kind of urbanite liberal millennial music consumer that requires their favorite artists to be Good People, which incentivizes pop stars to try to enact social change that pivots with each era, so their efforts scan as more of a pandery marketing schtick than a drive motivated by any innate and overpowering artistic calling. Mainstream music is ultimately an entertainment product. The commoditization of pop is nothing new, but Michael Jackson’s Thriller wasn’t trying to heal America.

At the risk of this dragging on into an incoherent and completely unhinged rant, I will stop here, because all of this is to say that we as a society need to go back to an era of authentic music, like the Scatman or Limp Bizkit.

---