From June through December of 2012, I kept a diary of musical impressions that didn’t develop into longer pieces. Here is a stew of them. What is contained herein is mostly celebrations, but this stew also contains a lone episode of carping about some music I don’t like at all. For this brief interval of bile, I apologize, but one must be true to what one hears…
***
Los Lobos is the best live band in the United States of America.
If they were not Chicano, I think, everyone (meaning the white reviewing establishment) would agree with this assessment. And maybe, in the next five or ten years, when they become undeniable elder statesmen (as opposed to just being middle-aged guys) this will be obvious, as it should be.
Having seen them play not long ago at Brooklyn Bowl, courtesy of Jolie Holland (of whom more below), who was sitting in on a couple songs, I was completely transfixed by their greatness. Not only is David Hidalgo surpassingly gifted at everything musical, but the band as a whole is remarkably versatile wherever you look. The bench, as they say, is hugely deep. Which is to say: there were also amazing performances turned in by Cesar Rosas, Louis Perez, and Steve Berlin, each of whom got a moment (or many moments) in the spotlight, and the rhythm section consisting of Conrad Lozano and a charming and hilarious and amazing young drummer whose name I did not get (is he the Cougar Estrada named on the web site?) was brilliant and locked in throughout.
The band is tight, so tight that the word is sort of meaningless, and they can play in any idiom on earth. And the solos, if you like that sort of thing, and I do, were just unfathomable. They played a few covers, and one of these, “One Way Out,” the old blues song made popular by the Allman Brothers, came in the middle of a jam where they got lost for a while. Cesar broke out the riff, and David started singing as though it had been planned all along, and the audience knew all the words.
The show was loose-limbed, funny, beautiful, proud, with just enough anti-professionalism to remind you that they got their start at the edge of the punk scene, and, for those who really care about the intricacies of band life, watching Rosas and Hidalgo work together, two astonishingly inventive players who have given decades to playing on the same stage, amounts to a dynamic live music experience unlike few I have seen in a long while.
The only other band even worth talking about in the same way, in the United States of America, is The Roots. And that band, while astounding, does not have a soloist like this band does. Los Lobos has several great soloists. This show reminded me what I want music to be about, what I want rock and roll to be about. At one time, this approach, this bar-band-touched-with-greatness approach was not unknown. Now is it as rare as, well, wolves in the wild.
***
Can’t Believe The Books Broke Up Already.
I really loved the cut-and-paste project known as The Books. They thought about music in a way that I imagined I very intuitively understood, which is that they mixed laptop grooves with acoustic instruments and very excellent and strange samples. At their best on The Lemon of Pink, their second album, the samples kind of were the verses of their pop songs, though there was no ignoring the essential qualities of the cello in how the songs became as complex sounding and virtuosic as they did. Paul de Jong was a great presence in the music that way. The closer the songs came to songs, the less interested I was, but for all that there was still something deeply surprising and new about The Books throughout their brief life, even on the somewhat sad and riven last album, The Way Out.
Most laptop music skews toward dance. The Books did not. They were surprisingly devoted to the samples as samples, but the acoustic part of the of thing often had a paradoxically Appalachian flavor (and that’s appropriate since, if I am not misinformed, Nick Zammuto was actually hiking the Appalachian trail at one point while they were working on an album).
Eventually, I guess, there was bad blood between Zammuto and de Jong, or at least aesthetic disagreement, and the collaboration was no more. It’s always depressing when this happens in bands you like, when there is Mould vs. Hart, or Simon vs. Garfunkel, or Reed vs. Cale, or Davies vs. Davies, or Gallagher vs. Gallagher, or Lennox vs. Stewart, or what have you. Time is the avenger, and all good collaborations untimely come to an end, through death or entropy.
Still, there is a very interesting box set out, now, of everything The Books released, entitled A Dot in Time, and it’s a limited edition type of thing. Totally worth pursuing it seems to me, and especially because the primary format in this case seems to be the LP, with lots of extras, a DVD, and a USB drive, so you can have all the tracks that way too. It’s sad to lose a band that seems at the height of its powers (only four studio albums into its career), but the box set is a fine record of what they did, and, I think, they lasted as long as The Clash.
***
You Cannot Deny that Recent Single by the Beach Boys.
Look, I understand that there are ways that the reunion version of the Beach Boys bears no resemblance to the Beach Boys, I know that significant members of the Beach Boys are no longer living, in particular Carl Wilson, whose singing is sorely missed, and I know that Brian Wilson is in his seventies, and I know that it is hard to admit to yourself that rock and roll is now best practiced by people in their seventies, that whatever this idiom is, it is now often performed by people who qualify for Medicare and Social Security, and I know, further, that there is a guitar break in this song, “That’s Why God Made the Radio,” that is borrowed from Toto, undeniably so, and I know that almost anything that involves Mike Love, who I believe once referred to “Good Vibrations” as “avant-garde shit,” involves surface affability in a baffling and irritating way, I know all of this. And I know that this is more the band that recorded “Kokomo” than it is the band that recorded “California Girls.” Which means that “That’s Why God Made the Radio,” the single, cannot possibly be good.
I further believe that digital recording is the enemy of the Beach Boys, because it makes vocals that were beautiful in a natural way sound as processed and auto-tuned as anything you might here on the “radio” these days. And there are too many session musicians playing on the song. And the lyric rhymes “when I” with “antennae.” All true.
Why then is it so good? Or if not good exactly why does it get under your skin somehow? I can’t think of many singles that I have loved in the last decade. I am not the sort of person who listens to a single. I listen to a body of work. I listen to a career. The kind of “radio” I like is the kind that plays a lot of deep catalogue, or which ignores everything happening in contemporary music. I like the radio that consists of all possible musics. But I can’t seem to let go of this song right now, and while “That’s Why God Made the Radio” is frankly nostalgic in a way I am suspicious of—as is the entire album of the same name—there is something that is very moving about the fact of this music, about its anti-rock qualities, its anti-contemporary qualities. I think it has to do with the fact that concerns about adulthood are addressed therein—getting older, recollection, grief—in a way that is just not possible in a musical market that concentrates entirely on instantaneity.
But that’s not all. One thing seems to remain of Brian Wilson, that genius, and that is a relationship to the complex possibilities of harmony. And at this point his idea of harmony, whose roots are in harmonies from the 1950s, in chromaticism, is so unusual as to be completely singular, and totally American. Even on a song like “That’s Why God Made the Radio,” which apparently dates back more than a decade, and which is nothing like the beautiful and reflective songs that end the album (a sort of a suite—“From There to Back Again,” “Pacific Coast Highway,” and “Summer’s Gone”), there is on offer a half-century or more of ideas about harmony. This is something that almost no one else in American music is capable of. Only Brian Wilson.
“That’s Why God Made the Radio,” the song, is mostly a frothy opportunity for a big out-chorus, in which just about everyone still alive in the Beach Boys family sings. All those voices. Why wouldn’t this be beautiful? There is the joy of these artists singing again. The fact of this joy. But more than that there is the joy of hearing all of American music for nearly sixty years distilled, summarized, and even, yes, advanced a bit.
“That’s Why God Invented Spotify” would be a more likely single these days, but what we actually have here, a middle-aged hymn to a dead medium, is far more interesting.
***
I know that Scott McCaughey is a sophisticated musician, with great talent, and an arresting array of projects and interests, all of them of surpassing musical interest, e.g., The Baseball Project, and The Minus 5, R. E. M., etc., but apparently I like the stuff that he whips off with one arm behind his back, the most elemental part of his output, viz., the Young Fresh Fellows, who now have another album out, called Tiempo De Lujo (Yep Roc), which they recorded in some alarmingly short amount of time that would be measured in days not weeks.
I hold my breath with excitement about new YFF albums, which means that I am frequently blue with oxygen deprivation because the albums do not arrive very often anymore. I think there have been three in the last decade, and this new one therefore arrives almost hurriedly, because there was a really good one just a couple of years ago (I Think This Is, 2009).
Tiempo De Lujo does not quite have the varnish of compositional premeditation that I Think This Is had, but who gives a shit? What’s good about a YFF album is the awesome camaraderie of the thing (McCaughey and Jim Sangster and Tad Hutchison have been playing together for about thirty years, and Kurt Bloch, the newcomer, is now at the 25-year-mark), and the thrill of reverently pilfered decades of rock and roll, and the excellence of the rhythm session (Sangster is a remarkably melodic bass player, and drummer Hutchison is a force for chaos, but in the best possible way), and Kurt Bloch’s great solos, and McCaughey’s made-them-up-just-now lyrics; look, there are a lot of bands who put a lot of hard work into what they do, and they have shit to show for it, and this band just turns on its incendiary enthusiasms when they feel like hanging out, and the results are incredibly winning and far more reverent than they appear to be at first blush. This is the kind of thing that makes rock and roll mean something again. Perhaps this album was not premeditated, but it has a lot of living in it, and it’s funny as hell, totally punk, and just as in-your-face as The Fabulous Sounds of the Pacific Northwest, the first YFF album from 1984, and it mentions Dr. Zizmor.
The Young Fresh Fellows are just as good as when they were legitimately young and fresh, in fact, they are more great, because they don’t need to make a career of this. They only need the joy, and there’s plenty of that on Tiempo De Lujo.
***
I’ve already said everything I can possibly say about Jolie Holland, but that would mean that I wouldn’t get a chance to write about her cover of “Rex’s Blues,” by Townes Van Zandt, which is on her most recent album, Pint of Blood (Anti-).
You can listen to the album version here, and that version is accompanied by piano and violin, i.e., Holland playing everything, and with a sort of sprung rhythm wherein the accompaniment really is accompaniment—the voice is the leading edge of the thing, and the piano just fills in around it. As a player of the fiddle, Holland is absolutely sublime, absolutely sublime. There is no fiddle player in contemporary music who touches her. Only Carla Kihlstedt reaches these heights, and she comes from the conservatory world. Holland originates from her own special hideout, and so there is no one quite like her. But by describing the waves of trembling fiddle I fail—as I am bound to do—to describe the emotional punishment of this song, and this is what I must attempt. The lyric starts likes this:
Ride the blue wind high and free
She’ll lead you down through misery
Leave you low, come time to go
Alone and low as low can beIf I had a nickel I’d find a game
If I won a dollar I’d make it rain
If it rained an ocean I’d drink it dry
And lay me down dissatisfied
The lyric doesn’t get any less dark thereafter—it is never a good old time. Everybody knows what happened to Townes Van Zandt, and his version of the song (probably the best version, or the least unfussy, is on Live at the Old Quarter), his rendition of the devastation and self-slaughter, takes a stridently impassive approach to the subject matter. He’s just telling you how it is. Holland means something entirely other. For one thing, Holland makes the melody count. It’s a beautiful melody, but Van Zandt plays it as a country song, while Holland is a lot closer to gospel. Gospel, to these ears, is more appropriate, musically, because you can kind of live in the melody a little bit, but gospel is more appropriate thematically because Holland, by slowing the whole thing down and contributing some wordless runs between the verses, accepts the self-slaughter and cares about it, whereas Van Zandt just indicates the likelihood that such things happen, of which he was exhibit A. Van Zandt sings “Rex’s Blues” like Hank Williams, which means that he sings it like someone who is going to die. Van Zandt sings it in both the third and first person (he’s singing about Rex, but he’s singing as Rex). But Holland sings it in the third, the first, and the third (she’s singing about Rex, she’s singing as Rex, she’s singing about Van Zandt), which means she has more layers, and while Van Zandt’s recording is sympathetic with Rex, it is not compassionate, because compassion is not a country music virtue (compassion is unmasculine), but Holland solves the problem by being a woman, and by using the gospel idiom to moor her compassion. Is there a first-person layer to Holland’s transcription? Is she singing about herself too? You could make the argument, which would mean it would have yet another layer, as in this verse:
Legs to walk and thoughts to fly
Eyes to laugh and lips to cry
A restless tongue to classify
All born to grow and grown to die
Which is perhaps partly about lost love, and so perhaps there is a love-love dimension to Holland’s recording. Which gives it at least four possible readings. Probably my favorite line in the whole is this “restless tongue to classify.” Did Van Zandt mean what he seems to mean? It’s an indictment of language, and the tendency of language (after Aristotle) to prove and ratify taxonomy above all, and in that business of differences, to endanger the speaker, to make the speaker a subject of language, and to feel in that paradox (the speaker is the subject rather than the speaker) an annihilation—a hard line to sing, in a deeply grim verse, but Holland seems to sing it with its full force. Maybe a line about epistemology in a verse about lost love all makes some kind of peculiar sense. At least it does in Holland’s recording.
All of this is to say: I think Jolie Holland’s rendition of the song is better than Van Zandt’s. Holland embodies and purges the horror of this lyric, by making the thing more compassionate, and Van Zandt wasn’t a legend as a singer anyway (and we are used to the notion, in the era of Bob Dylan, that good singing is an impediment). He was a writer first. And herein is a remarkable development. There is no other singer in the “indie rock” world who is an effective interpreter of songs. There are others who occasionally cover a song (Bonny “Prince” Billy covers songs exceedingly well sometimes), but there is no one who has that incredibly effective ability to interpret, the way, viz., Karen Dalton did, the way Nina Simone did. Holland has that kind of interpretive talent. She dashes off interpretations (I have been lucky enough to hear some of them) sometimes without thinking twice, though her instrument is so singular, so unusual that wherever she concentrates it, there is magic. You can see how she even reinterprets her own interpretations, by watching her revisit “Rex’s Blues” here, for guitar accompaniment:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5_Rd89X5OM.
Pint of Blood is otherwise originals, and Jolie Holland is a remarkable writer, too, but it takes time for originals to register, to reach their full flower. (Which is why I’m writing about a record that came out 15 months ago.) Interpretations have their impact more quickly, if the tune is familiar. “Rex’s Blues,” while not well known outside of Townes Van Zandt circles, has that familiar feeling, a melody we should have known already. And Jolie Holland makes it even more important, more indelible than it was before.
And the last thing I’ll say about this is: I was listening to “Rex’s Blues” while writing notes about the Purgatorio of Dante recently. And I loved how the second verse of the song, with its water imagery (“If it rained an ocean I’d drink it dry”) cohered with this marvelous passage in the Purgatorio, from Canto V (Mandelbaum translation):
You are aware how, in the air, moist vapor
will gather and again revert to rain
as soon as it has climbed where cold enfolds.
His evil will, which only seeks out evil,
conjoined with intellect; and with the power
his nature grants, he stirred up wind and vapor.
And then, when days was done, he filled the valley
from Patomagno far as the great ridge
with mist; the sky above was saturated.
The dense air was converted into water;
rain fell, and then the gullies had to carry
whatever water earth could not receive;
and when that rain was gathered into torrents,
it rushed so swiftly toward the royal river
that nothing could contain its turbulence.
Turns out Jolie Holland knows her Dante, too, and I’m not ruling out the possibility that she knows there is a connection between the fluvial imagery in Van Zandt’s underworld, as interpreted by Holland, and Dante’s purgatory.
***
Marcia Bassett is not a noise guitarist, because among other things the word “noise” when applied to music is incredibly stupid, where music is concerned it is a remarkably unuseful word.
Marcia Bassett, whom I only met a few weeks ago despite the fact that we are in the same Dante study group, is also known as Double Leopards, or at least formerly was, on occasion, and also records as Zaimph, and was, on this night that I heard her, playing with violinist Samara Lubelski, who has also played with Thurston Moore, among many others.
Things came out of Bassett’s guitar that are not supposed to come out of any guitar, and the relationship between the guitar and the violin (which also had a lot of pedals and mischief going on) was sublime. They played for half an hour for so, one song, improvised entirely (as far as I can tell), with no breaks, no commentary, and so on. This was, it’s worth saying, incredibly feminine music somehow, though abstract. It was graceful, calm, without being sentimental, abstract without being stupidly abstract, and there was no boyish self-centeredness. It was just remarkably beautiful music that sometimes sounded like a train, sometimes like an earthquake, sometimes like a siren passing in the street, and sometimes like a mouse climbing over the surface of an autoharp. Or sometimes it sounded like a hamster on a wheel. Or sometimes it sounded like an Ed Wood sound effect. There were collisions of melody, where you least expected it, and these were delicate and inviting, not Wagnerian.
So where would the noise part of the thing occur, if it is as I’m saying? Somehow, we have all come a long way from the days when noise was noise, which means: we tolerate a lot of dissonance, and we tolerate a lot of things that would have bugged us in the old days, explicitly non-musical sounds, and so on. These things sound beautiful, which is why Marcia Bassett and Samara Lubelski’s performance was beautiful, even though it was not sentimental, and was never obvious.
After Marcia, at Union Pool on the night in question, was Alvarius B., formerly known as Alan Bishop, formerly of the Sun City Girls (and co-founder of the awesome Sublime Frequencies label), one of the really great and interesting bands of the nineties (and they did, in fact, record an album called Dante’s Disneyland Inferno, which I am trying to scare up at the moment), and his performance was so stylized, provocative on purpose, deliberately nasty, and also rather sublime, all at once. And this morning I thought of him as one of the somewhat redeemed tyrants, sitting in the valley, surround by flowers that are more beautiful than precious metals, namely Marcia’s performance. He is still untrustworthy, slightly terrifying, highly moving, while Marcia, in the difficult opening act was full of compassion for him before he had even done what what he was going to do.
***
Owen Ashworth must have been reading Raymond Carver.
I knew about Casiotone for the Painfully Alone over the years, Ashworth’s first band, knew people who loved them without reserve, and I always understood the mix of British New Wave and Phil Spector and Suicide (the band) and incredibly bleak lyrics, but somehow I personally didn’t feel as painfully alone as the music required. (Which is not to say that I didn’t feel painfully alone on occasion.) I suppose I wasn’t ready. What would help me turn the corner? Seeing Owen play live, which I recently did at the Music Hall of Williamsburg.
This show was sort of a testament to the power of live music for me, for the following reasons: 1) Ashworth played a Fender Rhodes electric piano live throughout the show, and it sort of trumped the synthetic qualities of the Casiotone recorded work. Though you may think Ashworth doesn’t do anything but write the lyrics, and the machines do the rest, there is sophisticated melodic thinking going into those parts, and by paring away almost everything except the Fender Rhodes for the show, he reveals the music inside of the conceptual apparatus. And 2) by doing so he makes the drum machine seem less in control. The drum machine patterns he likes, which are really simple and uninflected (and the drum machine he likes is seriously old-fashioned and primitive), are something to work against in the live setting, and I loved every minor imperfection of entrance and exit, or the moments where he’d stop the song and then have to turn off the drum machine at the same time, it was where all the robust humanism of the songs started to leak out at the edges, and 3) he was a little bit nervous (opening for the excellent Mark Kozelek), and the nervousness made his voice, which is a blunt force instrument, even a bit more plangent, because he wobbled a bit at first, and, 4), perhaps most importantly there’s something about singing these songs to people as opposed to singing them in the privacy of your own home that requires a certain commitment. Yes, Ashworth’s songs are about a failure to communicate or about failure to reap all the rewards of contemporary life, and when you sing about these things to people, and people respond with a fair amount of warmth (as was the case here in the mostly staid neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn), it gives the whole thing a little bit of veneer of, well, redemption.
Moreover, there are some facts, in this new Ashworth regime called Advance Base, that make the whole a little triumphant. What’s with the name change? Why no more Casiotone for the Painfully Alone? Because, perhaps, Ashworth is no longer painfully alone himself. Because, perhaps, Ashworth is now a father, among other things, and being in the enviable position of someone who knows someone who knows him, I got to chat with him briefly after the show, and we traded kid stories. And I got to see a couple of pictures of Rosalie, his daughter. A very moving moment, and you could hear, in the conversation, how some of Ashworth’s natural skepticism about this mess that is human relations has given way, a little bit, to some excitement and even significant joy about parenting. Advance Base, then, might refer to the advanced accomplishment of not writing songs about the failure to connect in your studio on headphones, quiet enough that no one else can hear.
There’s something celebratory about this new Owen Ashworth, who, it must be said, is an incredibly sweet guy on first impression. The simplicity of the music and the absolute refusal either to compromise, or to worry especially about vocal delivery, do make Ashworth sound like Leonard Cohen, a little bit, a contemporary analogue, wherein even untoward showoffiness in the area of lyrics is de trop, but if you bear down on the Ashworth lyrics, which are all 7-11s and television shows and shitty American car models and bad holiday dinners, the aesthetic to me is just as artful as Cohen, only more minimalist-realist, as if he spent all his formative years reading Carver or Frederick Barthelme. I admire these lyrics so much. I wish I were this good as lyricist.
And then there’s one last point worth making and that is for all his wobbly sentimental/anti-sentimental vulnerability and his refusal to appear unduly professional in his recordings, Ashworth is also poised and committed about what he does, happy to be there, totally present for his vision, or so it appears, and this is at some variance with the serotonin deprivation of work, but totally winning. He’s a big, bearded, lion of a guy, and he appears to love making music, which makes it easy to love him.
***
And I tried to understand the Taylor Swift phenomenon this morning, but I do not understand.
I get that it is considered inhumane or bad form to say that music that breaks all sales records has no redeeming merit whatsoever. I remember those icy and condescending ripostes by Kelefa Sanneh about how the rock audiences were irrelevant to where music was in the middle oughts, and I’m sure he would say something laudatory, as one of his colleagues at the New Yorker has done, about how pure and confident and American Taylor Swift is, but I just want to say, it is not that I want to like things that are obscure or unpopular, it’s that the things that are heavily machined by the digital processing of the day (and few things are more heavily machined than, e.g. “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together Again,” her new single) sound utterly dead to me, like some flattened squirrel on a country road. Or these songs actually do sound to me like what the undead would sing if they were capable of singing.
I know that Robert Christgau, and others, have bent over backward to try to find something redeeming to say about Taylor Swift, like that she has a real knack with a chorus, and she tells us true things about what teenage girls or young women really feel, as though she were the Lena Dunham of the pop world (which she is not), but I remember all of that faux-confessionality from Jagged Little Pill, and from Natalie Imbruglia, and one summer’s bold and true lyrics are next summer’s post-menopausal antiques. I defy you to sing the words “Isn’t It Ironic?” without being ironic. And what about: “I’m all out of faith/and this is how I feel.” By Natalie Imbruglia? Feeling good about that one now? So I find the allegedly refreshing and honest lyrics of Taylor Swift repellant and artificial, as if thought up by a middle-aged Swedish guy with a coke and Ritalin problem, and if I had to listen to them for long I would probably have to run screaming form the room.
I respect Taylor Swift’s ability to steal from every available popular form of the moment, viz., “country” and pop and hip hop and electronica, but there is nothing in this music that does anything new besides fusing together a mandolin with a programmed drum track, and so I say it is inert, like the flattened squirrel, manufactured, ungenuine, and when we are forced to listen to two or three more of these albums, we will, as people do with relentlessness generally, begin to form a hard impenetrable exoskeleton to the work of Taylor Swift, and we will begin to hate it deeply (those of us who didn’t hate it already), and we will say horrible things about it and about her. This will not matter, because her parents work in finance, and she has good manners, and she’s going to marry up, and she’s going to get into the movies (not just guest appearances in CSI), and she’s going to launch some clothing lines at Target (no, wait, I think she already did that), and a personal fragrance (I think she did that too), and parlay all her bad press into some self-serious complaints, making good on every opportunity to monetize her career at the expense of making actual art.
Look, I normally only write about things I like, things I care about, but I can’t stop myself here. Taylor Swift represents what makes me want to die about popular music. She makes me want to die. If it’s all going to be like this—merchandising opportunities, branding, cross-platforming–the marble slab of post-mortality, then I am not interested in popular music. I don’t give a fuck. Taylor Swift makes music about as interesting as Olestra-based products, or Swiffers in multiple colors, or tiered Jell-O dessert products, or milk from China that has lead in it, or home cosmetic surgery, or rectal bleaching. Her publicists are adept at creating an ersatz Taylor Swift who appears to resemble a young woman with hauntingly insistent nostrils. But that does not mean that she is not a Swedish Ritalin-addict’s idea of the popular song, created by committee for demographic penetration. More than a million people bought her album in the first week. And every one of them was duped.
***
Oh, and I never did finish the Universal Thump interview I was going to do.
I cherish both Greta Gertler and Adam Gold, the principal players in this band, the Universal Thump, and truly admire their first full-length album (more here), especially for its arrangements which are extremely lovely and ornate, but they are shy and busy, and are in Australia getting married, and I don’t like pestering people, so here’s all we got so far, which was entirely from Greta’s point of view. Read a few lines, and then go and buy some of their songs. You’ll be glad you did.
Q: Can you describe the early history of Universal Thump? How did you meet? Was love always a feature in the music? Did love precede the music? How were the two integrated?
A: In July 2008, I asked Adam Gold if he’d play drums with me at a show at Barbes. I had previously had a tuba-rock band called The Extroverts, which had imploded for various reasons. Before that I performed solo under my own name, with a lot of different musicians. Adam and I had been friends for a few years, having met through mutual friends who are musicians too. We had always wanted to collaborate, musically. Adam is an incredible and very supportive musician and I’d always been so impressed with his work, particularly in the band Moore & Sons. But it just hadn’t worked out for us to work together until that fateful Barbes gig.
I scheduled a rehearsal with the band a week or so before the gig. I knew I’d always liked Adam a great deal as a friend, unconditionally. But fairly quickly after that rehearsal I fell completely in love with him (not just his drumming). The two – love and music – were pretty closely integrated from that time on. Many songs I wrote on the album are inspired by that time in 2008 – by our getting closer and also going through periods of separation. And the process of beginning “The Universal Thump” was enabled by our love for each other. Prior to that time, I really wasn’t sure I wanted to make another album. I did have a collection of songs that I had written that hadn’t been recorded, and there seemed to be forming a body of work that I really wanted to record, but I was feeling pretty bleak about making another record. Adam suggested we try it, and was so supportive of doing it that we began working on it in his studio, Oh Real Yum.
We also went on a whale-watching trip to Canada around that time – an adventure that we had together very early in our relationship, which inspired the process of trying to find the sound and the shape of the album together. We began by gathering ‘field recordings’ of sounds we were hearing, and imagining them intertwined within a sparse landscape of instruments. But the album gradually grew into a more ambitious orchestral pop album with over 60 musicians. I don’t think either of us realized that the album would take four years to complete, and we’ve gone through ups and downs with working on it so closely together. It’s been important for us to take breaks from the recording process. But I feel that ultimately working together on it has brought us closer. I’m really very proud of it.
Q: Can we go back slightly and talk about why you weren’t sure you wanted to make another album at the time that Universal Thump began? Just the vicissitudes of the music business? Did it have to do with working in NYC as opposed to in your ancestral homeland of Australia?
A: At the time that The Universal Thump began I was still somewhat recovering from the break-up of my previous band, The Extroverts. As the name suggests, there were certain strong personalities and dynamics within that band, that both made it exceptionally fun and raucous, and also prone to implosion. The rhythm section comprised of tuba and marching drums, there were two electric guitarists and me on Wurlitzer and vocals. We rehearsed, performed and recorded together in NYC for two years. We made a great record – “Edible Restaurant” – which really captures the live, theatrical sound of the band. It was the first time I’d managed to gather a steady band together in NYC, which was quite difficult as everyone was so busy and had numerous other musical projects. But it was something I’d always wanted. In the end, there was one too many “tuba tantrums” and we had to part ways. After channelling so much energy, passion and drive into that project, I was somewhat wary of heading down another collaborative venture, especially with someone that I was beginning a relationship with.
Aside from all of that, yes, the vicissitudes of the music business were also getting me down, after putting my songs out there as a solo artist, with The Extroverts and generally pounding the pavements of NYC for several years. Without any label, management or other music industry backing, it all gets a bit overwhelming… I guess my way of dealing with that disappointment was to express it as a fear of making another record. But honestly, I’m too addicted to making albums to ever stop. And, whether or not Adam and I were in a relationship, I had always wanted to collaborate with him musically. I have unconditional and unlimited respect for and trust in his musical talents, and I was thrilled honored that he wanted to work on an album with me…
42 responses
Nice post. I worked with Los Lobos once. Great band, awful crew, horrible sound. Strange how that one concert lingers in my memory. So loud people were streaming from the theater. Still, agree with you on the solos.
Can’t help but feel you indulge in some ranty hyperbole with Taylor Swift. Rectal bleeding? Recently, I drove my daughter and five of her friends to a dance and when TS’s song came on, they were all dancing and singing along. It was cute. Her songs are obviously not for me. Once, when I was my daughter’s age, I tried to get my mother to appreciate Led Zeppelin 4, and I bet if she were a writer, she would have had a similar reaction, maybe even used the term “rectal bleeding.” In some ways, TS has caused a perfect generational reaction from you–an adult ranting against contemporary music. Like, totally.
I think that was “rectal bleaching,” not “rectal bleeding,” a distinction which, in the context of the piece, should be clear enough.
And if I wrote a piece carping about Celine Dion would the carping count as a “generational reaction?” My issue is not with the age of the artist, but the uber-corporate vibe of the work. I happen to think certain other contemporary artists of the “pop” sort have some redeeming features. Ke$ha, to me, has certain redeeming features. Lady Gaga, to me, has certain redeeming features (although I dislike the meat dress). Justin Timberlake, to me, has certain redeeming features. Taylor Swift, to me, has no redeeming features.
I thought I had already actually died and was sentenced to hell when I heard Taylor Swift “sing” live for the first time. God save us all.
Ha! Bleaching! Not bleeding. Stupid old eyes. Or stupid careless reading. I guess I just find her innocuous enough to not care one way or another. That should be the title of a book or a story, in any event: “Bleaching! Not Bleeding!”
I’m probably shouldn’t have set myself up to be a Swift defender. But ever since my daughter took over the car radio, I’ve been immersed in the pop world in a way I’ve never been really. A year ago, if you would have told me that I’d love Ke&ha’s new single, I’d of thought you were insane. But it strikes me to be another in a long line of carpe diem rock tunes–Let’s get it on, love the one your with type tunes, with a killer hook. Still, it’s my daughter’s music, not mine.
Be well.
You are a menace to my Amazon credit card and a treasure for the Rumpus.
You are a very kind person Rick. With all the music out there, to try and find something positive to write about many of the acts you have mentioned over the years is amazing. Me, I’m not so nice. But I enjoy your column. I saw a film last night, a documentary about the tune, Hava Nagila, and there was a 30 second rendition of it by Bob Dylan…pur fingernails dragged across the chalkboard. Yep…
Harry, I know that Dylan rendition, or a similar one, on the early BOOTLEGS album. Very, uh, strange. Reminds me, someday, that I want to write about that Dylan Xmas album from two years ago. It has seemed fascinating to me how the Dylanologists have attempted to defend it. Tho it is so hard to defend.
“is he the Cougar Estrada named on the web site?”
If he was young, then he wasn’t Estrada. Estrada was part of the band for a while, but I think they’re using a different drummer now. The website mentions Enrique Gonzalez.
There’s a hint of the “grumpy old man” in your thoughts on Taylor Swift. She’s the best thing going in mainstream pop, in my view. And she has a more complicated, interesting public persona than most of her stature.
Also, I doubt you would console a male artist by telling him he will eventually “marry up”. Pffft, “actual” art.
Criticizing a young woman’s work as ‘repellent and artificial’, as ‘stealing’, as ‘manufactured, ungenuine’, not to mention all the class bullshit, the ‘making good on every opportunity to monetize her career at the expense of making actual art’ is such typical misogynistic drivel.
She does tell us true things about what young women really feel (in a far less rascist way than Dunham, whom I despise) and I know because I’m a 22yr old woman (who still listens to Torn on a regular basis, nearly 16 years after the fact). Swift provides us with strong narratives about the abuse we regularly suffer. As a victim of intimate partner violence “I Knew You Were Trouble” is so ridiculously important to me, it is a song that reaches out, tells a story, attempts to understand and at the same transcends. And all the criticisms hurled at artists like Taylor, are the same as as the abuse that put in fear of my life when yelled at me by my abuser. That we’re inconsistent, fake, frivolous, fucked-up, pathetic, etc. etc. As though it were not possible for women to contain multitudes. Such typical signs of a degraded patriarchal culture wherein the majority of media is created by and for men, where women are continually subjected to male viewpoints but men never have to consider ours at all, because they expect to be handed everything on a platter.
At my highschool not a single book on the syllabus had a female protagonist. I’ve grown up surrounded patriarchal culture’s heroes like Salinger, Hemingway, Bukowski, Picasso, Claes Oldenburg, Damien Hirst, Woody Allen, Bill Murray, Sean Penn, Eminem, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, just to name the well-known ones, all of whom create misogynistic work and most of them being outright KNOWN ABUSERS. And I seriously doubt any male artist (including you with your ivy league school, movie adaptations, a short story in every second Mcsweeneys, Sufjan Stevens, a pie-throwng publicity stunt) would be criticized for capitalizing on their success as an artist, the way that young women like Swift are.
Sorry for the vitriol but she inspires passion. Young women like me need artists like her. We need people our age (she is a year older tha me) writing about the things we are experiencing, we need artists who are like us, who are young and inconsistent (and what the fuck is consistency anyway?), who are both serious and fun, who ‘steal’ (like every other artist on earth) musical styles (I Knew You Were Trouble is the cleverest use of dubstep in a pop song yet), writers who decry abuse when so little popular culture does. I am a survivor. Taylor Swift is one of the few artists who make me want to live. I think that her lack of ‘redeeming features’ probably stems from your lack of empathy. Perhaps you find her music repellent and unimportant because that’s how you consider us. Take the time to try to understand young women, and if Taylor Swift still makes you want to die, then good. We don’t need any more boring misogynistic middle aged men on the planet anyway.
I appreciate a good flame when one is warranted, and do not shrink from my critics. However, I will say of the above: 1) that as regards Grace’s comments I definitely would, emphatically would, say of a guy that he was “marrying up,” and while I have not said it in The Rumpus yet, I may as time goes by. And 2) as regards Mikaela, while I think Taylor Swift is awful, and that “Torn” is awful too, and “Ironic,” I do not think these beliefs makes me a sexist. There are a great number of works of highest accomplishment on the subject of abuse or, let’s say, feminine consciousness in extremis that I think are great, and about which I have written in praise, for example I LOVE DICK by Chris Kraus, or Amy Hempel’s “Tumble Home.” And I believe that anyone who has read into this column a bit would recognize that columns about Martha Davis, which attempts to find a way for a male writer to write about art by a woman, or about Jolie Holland’s “Mexican Blue,” or about Romina Daniele, etc., are all passionately held opinions about the ability of women to make great, lasting art. Indeed, my column about Sticklips, a couple years back, was about an artist YOUNGER than Taylor Swift, whose work I happened to admire greatly. A woman. So while I understand the urge to toss around epithets like “boring misogynistic middle aged man,” and appreciate the rhetorical inflammations that produce such language, I am going to stick to my original proposition here. The issue is not Taylor Swift’s age or gender. The issue is her work. I am glad that younger women identify with her work, but identification does not necessarily mean that the work is deep. It just means that it is worthy of identification. Identification is just one motive for the consumption of art. And sometimes it is a shall motive. (Which is why Brecht, e.g., liked the alienation effect.) Furthermore, I never said Swift was inconsistent, which does not bother me at all. What I said was that I thought peddling a fragrance and having your own line of clothes at Target was suspect (and I felt this way about Kim Gordon’s clothing line, too). But in the end, it’s about the music, all of this is about the music, and while I am not a twenty-one year old woman, I am not without imagination or sympathy for all sentient beings. Such is the job of a writer. That still does not make the Taylor Swift songs more than cookie-cutter pop confections concocted in the studio by the producers precisely to tweak the heartstrings of people who don’t care terribly much about what music really is or can do. For the record, I feel this way about One Direction, too, that they are shallow nonsense, and I feel this way about Carrie Underwood, and I feel this way about almost everything else that happens on American Idol, which has gone about the destruction of musical craft liking nothing else in recent American history, and I feel this way about Maroon 5, and I feel this way about any number of recent “rock” bands, like Good Charlotte or what have you. I feel this about a lot of contemporary “r&b.” I think Destiny’s Child is pretty boring. In the end, art is subjective, it’s true, and I am not a 21 year old woman, but I care about the form of the popular song, and want it to go deeper and do better, I want it to sing about the complexities of human life, and Taylor Swift does not do this for me, and she’s not going to do this for me, and a lot of ridiculous hectoring about how I am misogynistic or sexist will not change my mind. Did any of the Taylor Swift fans here bother to read the sections of #40 about Jolie Holland, Marcia Basset, or the Universal Thump? I think not. Doing so might have slowed the ire down a bit so that a more substantive exchange might have taken place here.
What I find misogynistic is that you assume that the identification is shallow and that the people (read: women) who listen to it “don’t care terribly much about what music really is or can do”. I grew up in a house of music, it’s insane to feel that you have to prove your credentials but just to name the things I know you’ve written about; I literally grew up obsessed with The Feelies, Minutemen, Magnetic Fields, The Pogues, Sun City Girls, The Books, CFTPA, Yo Lo Tengo, among others. I can tap into these things that you write about. I just don’t see how you can call yourself a critic and think Dunham is important and not Swift.
It appears from your writings that you can only appreciate art that is beautiful (don’t you dare pretend Marcia Bassett’s work isn’t beautiful) or academic (Chris Kraus is one of my favourite authors but it is undeniable that her success as an artist began when she stopped making ugly films which weren’t academic), as though that were the highest bastion of achievement, which is just incidentally the lines of thought I find in people who hate young women. People who don’t give a shit about their needs or desires, who never consider that we WANT TO BE LIKE THIS. We want to disgust you and ourselves and make work that switches violently between eye-rolling at ourselves and indulging ourselves, that speaks about really fucked-up situations and really menial ones, and we want it to sounds compressed and flippant and melodramatic and awful and make you want to die but we also want you to stop making statements about how we’re shallow and “concocted” and assume our decisions are made by a record company or a tv show or our parents, because we work fucking hard to be like this. Hate us, but don’t assume about how we cope.
I think first and foremost art is an internal dialogue for its creator/s, secondly it is a dialogue with its audience, neither of which you could deny her immense success in. The third vital element of art is that is a dialogue with the entirety of what has come before it. Swift’s work so directly engages with the work of Burt Bacharach, Fleetwood Mac, The Beach Boys, Dolly Parton, just to get started. She’s continuing the form of the popular song, but it’s not the direction you want, she’s writing about the complexity life but it’s not one you need to access. You don’t like it and you don’t need it, but don’t pretend that means that you see more clearly what’s going on.
(Sorry that you consider this a ‘flame’ (I don’t know what it means, but I’m guessing writing in an emotional way rather than a so-called rational way). I’ve never accessed the kind of education that would teach me communicate in a way that you would consider substantive, which is probably another reason to look down on the poor duped plebs that need Swift’s work, but I’d never want to be surrounded by people so smart that they can’t empathize.)
i just think the taylor swift rant is funny because you’re picking on taylor swift! of course her music is bad (because of course it’s not all about the music). of course it’s about the marketing and the selling of stuff, like, you know, KISS or New Kids on the Block. I mean it’s pop music for a reason and you’re acting kind of surprised, like, jeeez, have you noticed that this super young huge pop star makes crappy music? I mean, you say it has no redeeming qualities, but i’ve got two kids, 6 and 10, when they hear we’re never getting back together they scream that shit. like i did to Rock me Amedeous, and you probably did to something like that too. that’s the redeeming quality and that’s probably about all it will do as an artwork, but then again, i don’t want all my artworks to be “deep” , as you say. besides, not all artworks are directed at you, or me. i mean, come on, she’s a kid, playing music for other kids! let the kids play, man! don’t pick on the kids.
Here are some things that don’t make sense to me:
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There is no way in the first sentence that “misogyny” follows from the premise of the initial sentence here. First, if I say that “identification is a shallow motive,” I obviously meant, and would mean, and still mean today that I think that it is a shallow motive in all cases. I think people who think that Justin Bieber speaks to them are shallowly engaged with the material. And, in fact, though I have not mentioned the Bieb in this context, he is a fine additional case study, because I strongly resist the Bieb in the same way that I resist Taylor Swift, and especially his family’s politics, and the way that these seem to exist as a smokescreen to conceal what feels like narcissism and excesses of power that one associates with “market penetration.” I think identification with the Bieb is shallow, and I think identification with Taylor Swift is shallow, and I think identification, for me, with contemporary fiction is often shallow too. This is a very general perception for me, and so it’s not unique to one gender. Ergo, the charge of misogyny does not stick, not on the basis of the premise in sentence one, nor does it adhere to the last sentence in your first paragraph, because I never said what I am alleged to have said about Dunham, and here I would refer you to the article itself. I believe I said that other critics have said that Swift tells us a lot about what it is to be a young woman, as though she were like Dunham, not that I thought that Dunham was somehow important and Swift was not, although I would probably support the idea that Dunham is a better delineator of femininity than Swift is, because she has more textual space, and characters in which to portray some drama. Still, this charge is unrelated to the topic sentence in the paragraph, and therefore does nothing to clearly advance the charge of misogyny which leads the piece, as though it is going to be developed, but is not.
Okay, onto paragraph two:
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In paragraph two, I object to the premise that I only like work that is “beautiful” and/or “academic,” because a) part of this piece (SWS #40) that you continue not to have read fully, or at least have not read fully on the basis of your responses, concerns, e.g., the Young Fresh Fellows, who are neither “beautiful” or “academic,” and part of it concerns Advance Base (aka Owen Ashworth, aka Casiotone for the Painfully Alone) who is also neither “academic” nor “beautiful,” and, although I will admit that the last section, about Universal Thump, is not quite fleshed out, I don’t believe that they are “academic” at all, though their string arrangements are beautiful. Unless you stretch the word “beautiful” out of all apparent shape (I would venture the guess that 95% of the listening world would resist the idea that Marcia Basset’s work is beautiful, for example), there is no real basis for saying that this piece, or most other pieces by me are primarily concerned with, or secondarily concerned with, or even tertiarily concerned with the “beautiful,” although it happens, yes, that I do find beautiful some things that most people find exceedingly ugly (Romina Daniele, about whom I wrote, and about whom you have not read yet, nor listened), but if that is the case then by some extenuations of argument I am as concerned with the ugly as with the beautiful. Second, I strongly resist the argument that Chris Kraus is “academic,” unless you mean, by it, that Chris is smart, and is married to Sylvere Lotringer, and that SEMIOTEXT(E) is distributed by a university press. And I happen to like her early work, too, so the argument doesn’t hold on that basis either. But, additionally, there is plenty of “ugly” and “non-academic” work by women that I like a lot, and have written about before: Maggie Estep’s poems, the Bush Tetras, Patti Smith, etc. Oh yeah, what about Patti Smith? Is HORSES “beautiful” and “academic” to you? Because I wrote about it at some length in my essay on the New York underground in ON CELESTIAL MUSIC, and I really love that album, and it does not fit your schema. There are other examples I already gave in my first response that don’t fit it either (Sticklips, Amy Hempel, Jolie Holland, Martha Davis), but you have not elected to respond to them, and so they don’t figure in paragraph two. Because they would indicate that paragraph two does not follow, and does not develop paragraph one.
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Third paragraph: in sentence one of the third paragraph you engage in circular logic, because you set up a premise, define it as fact and then presume that I can’t possibly disagree because you’re premise factual, which is sort of like that famous syllogism: “All cats die, Socrates is dead, therefore Socrates was a cat.” I am not in any way sure that I agree with the following idea: “I think first and foremost art is an internal dialogue for its creator/s, secondly it is a dialogue with its audience.” T. S. Eliot, e.g., said that poetry was not about expression of the self, but relief from the self, and I often find that I agree with this premise. And I further admire that statement of Don DeLillo’s “I don’t have an ideal audience, I have a set of standards.” But even if I agreed with your premise, I would have trouble agreeing with the booby-trapped conclusion: “neither of which you could deny her immense success in,” and my resistance here is not only to the preposition at the end of the sentence. I do actually deny her success with respect to the idea that the work is a “dialogue with the audience,” because the audience has no forum for reply, except in units purchased. I don’t believe she is in dialogue with her audience, though I recognize that there are many people who enjoy her work. I believe she is in dialogue with the marketing department at her record label.
And, frankly, no matter how many times Taylor Swift namedrops Fleetwood Mac, namedropping does not create a genuine influence or synergy with the work adduced as influential. Fleetwood Mac is the work of a band, with very particular qualities associated with its group production, a certain guitar sound, and the highly complex intrapsychic dynamics between the members thereof, a certain idea of how backing vocals work, as everyone knows. Swift may LIKE Fleetwood Mac, but just because she can write a good chorus (some say), and diss, in the process, her army of former lovers, does not mean that she is Fleetwood Mac, the Fleetwood Mac of “World Turning” or “Don’t Stop” or “Tusk,” and that is the case whether Stevie Nicks says so or not. The Bacharach and Beach Boys allusions are unsupported in the paragraph, because they cannot be supported. How exactly does Taylor Swift resemble Burt Bacharach? Sophisticated and adult lyrical content? Major seventh chords? Dionne Warwick vocals? Multiple time signatures? Jazz influence? Cinematic influence? String arrangements? There is no resemblance outside of a wish for there to be a resemblance, and I would say the same things about the Beach Boys. Swift likes to namedrop the Beach Boys, but I do not see the multiple-voiced harmonies, the chromaticism, the counterpoint, the Chuck Berry riffs, the coherent and consistent thematic reiterations, the experimentation. I don’t hear any of that, unless you are referring, perhaps, to the Beach Boys of “Kokomo.” I might hear some of that.
And I can’t follow this last sentence at all: “You don’t like it and you don’t need it, but don’t pretend that means that you see more clearly what’s going on.” Just not sure what I’m supposedly pretending to do here, because I don’t think I’m pretending anything at all. I just don’t like the work, and I think it is a reasonable perception, and not evidence that I am a misogynist, or that I somehow resist or dislike young women (many of whom I am related to and love deeply).
Last paragraph: I recognize that here I am being thrown a bone, because here the “emotional” tone of the exchange is recognized, in which you, Mikaela, have wished me dead, and also called me a misogynist for no very compelling reason, and therefore these are being walked back a bit, but only in order that I can, it is implied, be termed “without empathy.” Or, perhaps, in the last line, it is implied that all smart people are so smart they are without empathy. I would submit that one of the great blessings of smarts, for those who have them (and I would be the first to admit that I do not always have them) is the capacity to be MORE empathetic, rather than less, and I would certainly, as a writer on music, imagine that it is more my responsibility to be empathetic than not. This, therefore, seems like a low blow, and more shrill than carefully reasoned. I’d be happy to conduct this in a way that is adult and non-inflammatory!
I will admit the following: as a critic, I am fine with Taylor Swift making her records, and I think it is good that people identify with her records, and I am glad that young woman have music than means something to them, even though I feel very confident in saying that many listeners may wake up in a decade and think that these songs sound really thin, overly processed, and a bit embarrassing (it is true, I had a Kiss album in 1975, and I regret it now). However, the one thing I cannot take, and it’s the reason for my little rant (which one friend said was sort of like a straight woman going to a gay bar and trying to present as a lesbian), is that the critical standards of the time have shifted, and we now accept as “important” work that we would have felt was incredibly watery and thin a generation ago, because the major cultural engines of popular culture no longer produce work of any great substance the vast majority of the time. I have often had this thought about contemporary film. That now we think “Up In the Air” or “Something About Mary” are art films, whereas thirty years ago an art film was Fassbinder or Wenders. The frog, in the pot, is being heated very slowly, and soon the frog is going to boil, without ever having realized it. And this is what irks me about Taylor Swift. She is young, hardworking, ambitious, but her work is not terribly musical, at all, has few of the qualities I associate with music, unless you are talking about say, New Kids On the Block, or Hanson, or the Bieb. I cannot pretend otherwise. But the culture as a whole is engaged in a fullscale attempt to pretend otherwise.
To put it another way, Pete: actually, I do want all my artworks to be deep, because that is one of the essential qualities of an artwork, to me. If otherwise, then the artwork is not quite art. Or that is my sense of it. If that makes me a boring middle-aged guy, guilty as charged.
i had no idea anyone considered “something about mary” an art film. nor did i know that serious people were calling taylor swift artistically “important.” well, you certainly present a depressing picture. “the culture as a whole is engaged in a full scale attempt to pretend” that taylor swift is a brilliant artist? like dylan, or something? i had no idea. it’s true years from now, taylor swift fans may look back and regret their poor taste, just as you do with KISS, but, you shouldn’t, Rick. it’s okay to like crappy music when you’re young and inexperienced. seriously, i mean this as a genuine question, when you say “unless you are talking about say, NKOtB, or Hanson, or Bieb” —are people actually arguing that she is not part of that group?
So because popular music isn’t moving in the direction that you, a white cis male who already has every piece of “meaningful” art in this world directed and marketed specifically towards him, wants it to be going, it’s not considered important? And, let me get this straight, are you seriously speaking on the behalf of ALL of the millions of girls who bought this album and claiming that each and every one of them was duped? WHO ARE YOU and how much more full of yourself can you be? In ten years, not only will we look back on this album and think of how groundbreaking and influential to our personal lives it was, we will also be thinking of how much Taylor has grown since this time, because like it or not, her fans are die-hard and she will still be around.
And yes, the times have shifted, because we live in a progressive country (you know, where things change), and with this progress comes the emerging voices of those who once had little or no space to say what they wanted, and Taylor Swift is amongst these voices. Just because you went through your entire history looking for brownie points “supporting” your positive stance on female artists doesn’t mean you’re not being completely dismissive, and yes, misogynist, on the very specific and relatable things that she has to say. Her music IS NOT FOR YOU. She is not marketed towards creepy middle aged men who want to see her half naked strutting around like a sex-object, which, really, is the complete opposite of what the majority of female pop musicians have been in the past. Can’t she get some credit for even that?
If you did some research before writing this piece you might have noticed she produced her first single from this album SPECIFICALLY to annoy the little pretentious ears of her indie-loving ex-boyfriend who “made me feel like I wasn’t as good or as relevant as these hipster bands he listened to.†Sounds a lot like you. And the song is playing repeatedly on radio stations across the world for him to hear..if that’s not a genius artistic move on her behalf then I don’t know what is. These aren’t accidents, she is very aware of what she is doing and of how much she makes you “want to die.” There’s more to this artist than the music itself, there is an entire conceptual layer that you have completely missed and it’s what draws us to her. Once you learn to accept that more and more popular music (and art in general) isn’t going to be directed towards YOU, and that these artists don’t even care to take your flimsy opinions into consideration, maybe you’ll gain the empathy and respect needed to acknowledge that what Taylor Swift is doing is, in fact, very important.
Hey Mel, I appreciate your feeling empowered at the cost of civil discourse here, but since I have been trying in the comments page to turn all of this back in a slightly civil direction, having acknowledged in the above that my particular beef is more with critical environment and the star-maker apparatus in this case than it is with Swift’s right to make her albums, I would appreciate it, perhaps, if the tone were more on the construction of argument than on the assault part. To wit, the implication that I would write about women artists in the past in order to score “brownie points” is bizarre, because if I were in the market for “brownie points,” I certainly would not stick out my neck in order to carp about the best-selling artist in America at the moment. If I were thus–a writer who had no particular “standards” upon which to evaluate, but were merely attempting to curry favor with women, I would, as I have perhaps accused some others have doing, have merely indicated that Swift has a “knack for a chorus.” And left it all there, and then you would, perhaps, consider my a trenchant and insightful music critic.
I get that, demographically speaking, the work is not for me. Though there does seem to be a great deal of art made by younger women that has been for me over the years: Patti Smith, PJ Harvey, Hole, Bikini Kill, Kristin Hersh, Tanya Donelly, Liz Phair, Amy Winehouse, even Kate Bush, whom I very much enjoyed when she was a teenager (i.e., younger than Taylor Swift), and, for example, Adele, who I think has the virtue of an extremely good voice (though she might not have gotten there had Winehouse not sketched out the British soul thing a little more creatively first). I actually like Adele quite a bit, notwithstanding the depressing fake electronica veneer on her record. Not one of these artists on this list is famous for taking her clothes off, and while the later Hole recordings are not as good as LIVE THROUGH THIS, there was a moment when even Courtney Love was a standup citizen in the area of female empowerment. Frankly, I am so old, and so contemptible from your point of view, that I have long since aged out of watching women undress in order to sell music. I find that embarrassing, I’m afraid, and a bad career move, so she does get points for that, except that they are cancelled out by the existence of a fragrance, and the extremely challenging advertisement for the fragrance. Much of this music that I’m not supposed to like because apparently only demographics count in the creation and marketing of music (I guess, Mel, you’re not allowed to like Bob Dylan either, because that is NOT FOR YOU, which means that all music is created for these tiny demographic micro-climates, though at one time music was made–the Beatles, e.g.–with the idea that it might be for everybody), I do in fact like, and have liked in a variety of times (I have specifically picked a list of female artists here who span an entire era from 1975 to the present), thus indicating an ability to keep up with your putative “progress.” It seems to me, therefore, that this argument–that I am incapable of progress– doesn’t quite stick either.
The crime I have apparently committed with respect to Swift is simply that I do not like her work. There is no “empathy” involved with thinking that Swift is important, though I may have empathy as to the matter of how difficult her life must be right now, always splattered across the pages of the slicks and the tabloids, and I do have empathy with that. But if I view my job as critic to be primarily concerned with the evaluation of musical craft, and some kind of sense of the work as produced in a cultural context, then there is just no basis on which I can say that this work is “important,” nor, alas, can I view it as “conceptually smart” or canny, unless you mean that the conceptual apparatus is to deform “country” music until is sounds as wan, faceless, computer-based and inhuman as every other top forty product of this moment. This is just my opinion, understand, the lack of merit in this work, though I happen to believe that there are others who feel this way, who just don’t want to endure the tedium of being shouted at every day by the fans. I get that there is a lot of musically conservative stuff out there–and that there can be a reason to use and consume music that is not musically ambitious. I don’t dispute that (Pete, this part is for you), but I don’t understand getting on the bandwagon to lionize the work simply because it has shifted a lot of units. That is a bad precedent, from my point of view, and a peculiarly American thing: this artist is “successful” and we can’t be critical of “success,” because that is anti-capitalist. Swift is nothing if not a successful venture capitalist, and I admire her ability to generate a revenue stream. I am glad for her that that is true, and her future is probably secure. Mine is not.
Are we straight here? You can call me a misogynist all day, but it is a lazy argument in this case, though I do actually repent of the phrase “post-menopausal antique” in the original piece. As deployed here, “misogynist” is designed more to score points than to arrive at a rhetorically powerful argument as to why Taylor Swift is a great artist (producing her album in order to piss off one of her ex-boyfriends, is not, in this context, a rhetorically powerful argument), when what you are really saying is: I REALLY FEEL VERY STRONGLY ABOUT THIS WORK AND I THINK YOU ARE AN IDIOT FOR NOT AGREEING WITH ME ABOUT THAT. But I just do not agree, and I am not going to agree, though I am glad you feel strongly about the work. And, however dull it is, I intend to continue defending myself here, until we have exhausted all the shrill stuff.
Part of the depressing legacy of this piece is that I feel like I wrote extremely well about Jolie Holland’s “Rex’s Blues,” and if all you Taylor Swiftians actually wanted to here a really exceedingly successful and profound work of art by a woman, you might actually follow the link in that part of the piece, and listen to that song, which does in fact have things to say about your plight.
Rick you are right in in your critique of Swift’S music. I think the same of her and the One Direction et al drivel. That overproduced crap sells well but has no soul in my opinion. Like the Dan Brown of music. Unfortunately there is no convincing the masses and your thoughtful critique only riles them up.
It has been pointed out in various places that Taylor Swift’s songs engage a misogynist discourse.
Below a few links:
http://bitchmagazine.org/post/taylor-swift-wants-to-ban-access-to-your-lady-bits
http://sherlocks.tumblr.com/post/1384438737/can-i-just-talk-about-taylor-swift-for-a-minute
http://sexistculture.tumblr.com/post/1041391432/taylor-swift-why-do-you-insist-on-warping-young-girls
the nicest thing is probably this bit on jezebel
http://jezebel.com/5953879/dont-go-calling-taylor-swift-a-feminist-says-taylor-swift
Which correctly asks “But do we need another photogenic cisgendered carefree white girl singing heteronormative songs about mooning over boys?”
It probably makes little difference, at this point, but I must say that the vapidity of Taylor Swift’s music, all pretty, predictable surface, strikes me like the final nail in the coffin of what was once the world’s liveliest & freakiest variety of popular music, namely, the American Top 40. We no longer have a vital commercial music scene (where even Bob Dylan could carve out a place for himself), but a processed music-type product, painted w/ bright red lipstick & whining the most obvious rhymes & thumbsucking complaints. All y’all attacking Moody’s take on Swift ought to spend some time in Italy, as I have, & witness the outrageous ruin of a magnificent musical tradition. Over in Naples & Rome & Venice, pop has been flattened into a Berlusconi pinup, & mark my words, if too many Americans consider Swift & her cohorts the McCoy, the same will happen here. The tar pits will swallow all, & clog our ears w/ the same suffocating goo.
People, come on here. Rick Moody is reviewing music and telling us what he likes and doesn’t like. Who cares if my ten year old sings I Knew You Were Trouble at the top of her lungs every time we get in the car? Does that mean he has to like the song? Mr. Moody doesn’t have the power to stomp out Taylor Swift’s music, as much as some of us might like him to, and others of us wouldn’t want him to. Ms. Swift’s career is impermeable to his criticism. Readers would do well to be so too.
Why is it that when someone–anyone–has anything relevant, humorous, sincere and DEAD-ON straight about anything nowadays, people are quick to jump and scream MISOGYNIST or whatever other derrogatory term? I like Taylor Swift’s music on the same level I appreciate modern pop music for its entertaining and brainless fun. It makes me sad, though, that she IS the reflection of where American girls’ heads are nowadays. It’s all about the man. The relationship. The “he hurt me so we are like, never, ever, gonna get back together.” Believe you me, Taylor Swift is no Joni Mitchell, but she is a voice of modern day society. Good for her and God help us all.
Well written piece on music, Rick Moody! I couldn’t agree with you more, and it’s such a pleasure to read you on The Rumpus.
This argument really taps into something that touches me deeply and frankly pisses the **it out of me. The idea that Taylor Swift is “writing about the complexity of life” is just mindboggling and an insult to the brilliant writers and artists in this country who are constantly hanging by a thread attempting with dear life to produce work that is original and throught-provoking. I am really tired and sick of having people telling me I am a bully for defending writers that get no press and little money and asking people to second guess what is popular. I ask one of the Swift defenders, please listen to a Kristin Hersh album. Really, listen to it and then turn around and tell me Taylor’s music is “complex”. Here is a woman who probably makes about $30,000 a year, raises five kids, suffers from a mental illness and produces more than an album a year. And yet I am a bully and a misogynist for preferring her work to Taylor Swift. You can defend her all you want but it’s a bit like defending “Fifty Shades of Grey” while all of Mary Robison and Joy Williams languishes out of print. Mel says of Rick “And, let me get this straight, are you seriously speaking on the behalf of ALL of the millions of girls who bought this album and claiming that each and every one of them was duped? WHO ARE YOU and how much more full of yourself can you be?” When actually, I think he is speaking on behalf of all the girls (and boys) who feel ashamed and alone because they do not relate to the crap being fed to them. The future Ann Beatties, Tanya Donellys, Vic Chesnutts, Raymond Carvers. The young girls who listen to Taylor Swift have not been duped they’ve just yet to appreciate what great music really is. But as we put our dollars and defense to people like TS we are taking away from those who really need it.
Just a couple thoughts.
a) I’m sincerely pretty confused about why this conversation is even a thing. And I’ll lay my cards on the table. I actually do like Taylor Swift. I don’t think she’s good by any stretch of the imagination, but I put the music in my ears, and then I enjoy it, and thankfully that’s all I require. In any case, despite being a Swiftian, I also think that people should be allowed not to like things that I do like without being bad people. Unless I missed it, I don’t believe there was any part of this post in which Rick attacked T-Swift personally; he mostly commented on her music and her career, and I hardly think that he’s a misogynist or that he deserves to be yelled at for not enjoying a song.
b) Also, can I just say that accusing someone of misogyny for not liking Taylor Goddam Swift is insulting to me as a feminist (and yeah, sure, I’ve got a dick, so feel free to attack my credentials for that, and I will feel free not to listen to you).
I won’t deny that patriarchy makes the music industry way more difficult for women to navigate than for men. And yeah, there’s a double standard. However, I think creating a system wherein all music with a woman’s face on the album is to be celebrated or else. As people who believe in the power of women, we should all the more be fierce critics of women’s music, and we should not be willing to accept when subpar music made by a woman is successful because it abides by the rules of the patriarchy.
And make no mistake, Taylor Swift is as patriarchal a woman singer as has existed in recent years. In the first place, Taylor Swift uses six goddam autotuners. Six. For comparison, T-Pain used one and he sounded like a fucking robot. With six of the them, you could make Chewbacca sound like Aretha. So obviously, Taylor Swift is not being celebrated for her musical talent, because that’s manufactured in a lab. The only reason she has a career is because she’s marketable as a young woman who sings about things high school girls can relate to. Women who function as products made by men because money can be made off of them is the enemy of feminism, and it mostly leads me to wonder what amazing female talent the world is missing out on because the industry found someone who was easy to sell. (Or, really, the industry found twenty girls who are easy to sell, and has been selling them ever since).
Moreover, pretty much all of Taylor Swift’s songs are about men. And yeah, I’m sure there’s an eleventh track tucked away on an album somewhere that isn’t, but all of her most successful music has been about men. So, Taylor Swift’s career is created by men, written about men, and than packaged with a pretty face and sold to young girls who can also dream about men. This is patriarchy at its finest. Even with a pretty face on the album cover, the career of Taylor Swift SUPPORTS a system in which men are the center of the universe rather than defying it. And it’s easy to be tricked by that, because what you see is a young woman making a name for herself, but, you know, you could say the same thing about women in porn, and they’re certainly not looking to smash the patriarchy.
So please, don’t call someone a misogynist every time they question the music of a woman. It creates an atmosphere in which the rest of us, who have a keen interest in learning how misogyny functions systemically, have to work harder because people only associate feminism with attacking men, when it’s really intended to empower everyone.
c) I don’t think music should be judged on the morals of the artist. Yeah, there have been a lot of male musicians who have sung about a lot of awful things, and done a lot of awful things. And I hate to think that their music has caused harm.
But, on the other hand, I don’t care if their music abides by my moral framework; I care that it’s well made. And if I have to choose between a song which is meant to empower women, and is horseshit (also, by the way, your reading of “I Knew You Were Trouble” is the most isogetical thing I’ve ever seen) or music which is extremely problematic, but sounds good, I’m usually going with the latter. And maybe that makes me a bad person. But honestly, I’d rather support good music than support an industry which wants to water down every feeling into vague, pre-approved emotions.
and don’t you for a second accuse me of speaking from privilege here, because I’m not. As a gay man, I would gladly listen to The Pogues call me a faggot a thousand times before I ever listen to Christina Aguilera call me beautiful.
and seriously, enjoy your music. Please do. But don’t force everyone else to enjoy your music or suffer your wrath.
The Swift apologists are offering defenses on par with the type of music they are defending.
Her decades-hence impact will be akin to that of a well-meaning person accidentally heading to a BBQ joint on Karaoke Night — with it’s binder full of years-past chart-topping singles that’d make a deaf man purchase earplugs — and deciding that such-and-such Taylor Swift song will be sooooo funny to sing, golly now won’t it ever be so hilarious, why, let’s down three or four drinks and put our names on the list to bleat out a few unfortunately-familiar lyrics. Have a good ol’ time.
Thanks, Rick, for cogently and appropriately placing the flattened squirrels on the proper side of the music spectrum, while more often writing gorgeously about the infinite gems that are often overlooked and underplayed and difficult to seek out. I’d rather read a million words you write on Brian Eno than a handful of trite, successful-praising glad-handing words about Bieb or Swift or whichever next product comes next. Their success is perhaps the proof that democracy is a sham and that masses of people ought not to be trusted.
My 16-year-old daughter recently identified for me the source of a repellent song on the radio. “That’s Taylor Swift?” I asked. “Yes, isn’t she awful?” was her reply. I agree, Rick Moody. Thanks for saying it aloud.
I have yet to see an argument from the Swift-pologists in this thread that actually explains how Swift’s work is significant. I once wrote a column for a small college newspaper about the use-value of Swift’s music, and how her songwriting was painfully generic, probably in an attempt to be relatable to a maximum number of people. Of course, some might argue that well-selected, specific details do the job better because even those if details are different from person to person, we recognize in other people’s details analogs in our own lives. With that in mind, here is what I hear when I listen to Swift–vague, cliched lyrics and sentimentality for sentimentality’s sake. That being said, the line on “We Are Never Getting Back Together” about her ex’s indie records was fun, clever, and specific. It was the kind of line her work could use more of. Looking at the rest of the song’s lyrics, they’re all so vague and generic. I’ve literally heard every other sentiment expressed in the song in a thousand other songs/films/television shows/stories/books/everything. It’s not original. It’s not interesting. It’s lazy and boring. So it has a fun beat, and the chorus is kind of fun to sing along to, that’s fine, but is that where we’re setting the bar for “significant music”?
I have a theory about this attempt to elevate Swift’s music. It comes down to this sentence quoted from Mel’s above post: “This is just one reason why Swift is important, she speaks about specific things I can relate to and she is extremely accessible.” This seems like a narcissistic approach to music. Translated: “She sings about things I’ve experienced and she’s easy to listen to, ergo she must be significant.” I’ll admit, I once felt that way about certain music. When I was 17-23 or so, I loved pop-centric emo music (The Promise Ring, Jimmy Eat World, etc…), and I loved it because it was all about *feelings* and it was about the same *feelings* I was *feeling*, and how could something *I* could relate to *not* be significant? Well, now I realize this was a pretty self-absorbed stance to take. And now, I look to music to experience other people’s specific artistic visions, to learn from their views and attitudes. I can’t learn much from Taylor Swift because her lyrics read more like a compilation of overly-familiar thoughts than anything unique or inspired. With all this being said, I enjoy plenty of pop music, and sometimes it’s more because of the production than the lyrics (Beyonce’s “Countdown” for instance). But Swift’s production also tends to be about as bland, and compressed as her lyrics.
So is there an argument in favor of Swift that moves beyond the “it’s important to *me*” stage? Because, there is plenty of music from my past and present that is important to *me* that I don’t think is particularly significant or noteworthy in terms of its import or influence.
So I’m genuinely curious: why is Taylor Swift a significant artist? Convince me.
I like real stuff, made by real people. I like hand-made burgers, not something extruded by a machine six months ago and then microwaved at a fast-food joint. I like tube amps and hand-made clothes and furniture, and I like it when I get the chance to buy food from the people who grew it. I like beer and wine that never saw the inside of a factory. I like it when restaurants cook to order, instead of serving up food prepared in an off-site commissary and reheated in a microwave by a so-called cook. I prefer coffee made by a barista whose espresso machine requires more mastery than the simple pressing of a button with an icon on it, and I prefer lath and plaster walls, and hand-made shoes and knives and pool cues and cathedrals and skyscrapers and musical instruments and pens and paper and rugs and jewelry and furniture and watches and sculpture and paintings.
Artifacts produced in an authentic way by real people have a different heft and resonance than the things that have been smoothed over by computer-driven machinery. I appreciate the humanity that inheres to imperfection.
Ultimately, for me, it isn’t a question of whether the goods with a human touch are superior to the mass-produced goods or not. I feel connected to things that people make, and disconnected from the things made by machines; made things make me feel less alone and connected to the human creative impulse, while manufactured things make me feel more alone. And Taylor Swift’s processed, manipulated, manufactured, mass-produced music ultimately makes me feel very disconnected from my fellow human beings, and horribly lonely.
Mystified by Swift’s popularity. The comparison to Dolly Parton is intriguing but ultimately, I believe, unjustified. Parton certainly has a keen sense of what sells. But she’s also got that voice– she can run circles around Swift in the talent department. Even the most commercial aspects of her work seem articulate (and authentic) in a way that the Swift oeuvre never does. And I’d bet money Parton can outrun Swift in the sense of humor department, too. I doubt she would resort to the ugly namecalling used in some of the comments here. But I don’t know that much about Parton. For all her shtik, she just seems more genuine than Swift.
Which brings me to another point– there is something terribly sad about Swift’s public image. I’m coming from a feminist place when I say that. I don’t have any problem with women choosing romance or domestic matters as their subject. But the posing and eye batting, the moony videos that look like cologne ads. Somebody on this thread expressed admiration for the line in the song about how TS wasn’t cool enough for her uber-hip boyfriend. But I cringed at those lines because she seems oblivious to the possibility that yeah, her work is lacking most of the qualities that make popular song great: authenticity, musicality, depth in simplicity. Self-awareness of the primp-free, non-navel gazing variety. Clearly I’m out of step with the zillions who enjoy her music, and yeah, I rarely hear anything top 40 that I can tolerate. Although last year, there was Alabama Shakes. Brittany belting her heart out — and people buying their music and showing up to hear them in little clubs around the world– makes you think there’s still hope for authenticity.
“Authenticity” – That’s a description of music that should be left in the embarrassingly self-concious high school years. Music is good or bad – I don’t care if it was written in a bedsit or in an evil pop genius’s Swedish lab. Swift is no less “authentic” than Ani Di Franco. She writes her own music, co-produces it, releases on an independent label and heads her own management company. There is nothing less joyous than snobbery about “mass-produced”, mainstream pop acts.
No one is claiming Swift is the next coming of Bob Dylan. But to dismiss her fans as “duped” is wrong. They know what they’re getting and enjoy it. (For the record, her fanbase extends far beyond teenage girls. Her albums vastly outsell those of Bieber or One Direction)
There is artistic merit in her work and, while she doesn’t have anything near the musicality of Brian Wilson, she does capture that first rush of teenage infatuation as well as anyone. Listen to “Our Song” from her first album, or “All Too Well” from her latest. If they don’t take you anywhere, she’s not for you. But to dismiss the engagement her fans have with her music, or to dismiss her as someone who will “marry up” reflects badly on you.
I like Evelyn’s Alabama Shakes gloss. A really incredible band, with a really incredible singer, who are undoubtedly totally authentic. I agree, “authentic” is a dangerous word, especially in an age that dotes on the synthetic, but perhaps there are times when a word of that kind has some meaning (and it must mean something, or else it would not continue to be in circulation). Many is the time, in the last year, that I have listened too “You Ain’t Alone,” from that first album by Alabama Shakes (and especially a live version on YouTube), and have been deeply moved. And these are musicians in their early twenties as well. This, indeed, for me, was one of the great discoveries of 2012, in terms of new acts. And it’s the sound of a group of actual musicians (not machines) playing in a studio together, the way you can hear that bass player (with the awesome beard) locking in with the drummer, an actual bass player with an actual drummer, that’s part of what’s so moving. Also the Brittany Howard (I think that’s her name) seems to know so much about human psychology at such a young age, or, perhaps, the way her voice suggests that knowledge, in her Otis Redding/Aretha Franklin stylings. They got a Grammy nomination, and they totally deserved a Grammy nomination, and I hope it leads them somewhere further down that soul/early rock journey. It is not ownership of the means of production that confers authenticity in all cases, it’s the ability to make art, especially, e.g., in small-town Alabama, when all the hit-making apparatus seems to be elsewhere, the fancy as-many-tracks-as-you-want computer studios with the computer techs who can make a fake drummer for you, and overdub a mandolin so it all still sounds a bit country. But in this case, the case of the Alabama Shakes, none of that was available, just the kids and their instruments, and some of the desperation of small town life. To me, it’s something precious.
Saw Alabama Shakes live last year, and it was amazing to see them up close (General admission but I was right against the stage). Unfortunately they didn’t sing You Ain’t Alone– it was a really short set– but they are the real thing in a way that almost no one else on the radio is. Real music, real heart, real soul.
Can’t really see how the question of whether music is authentic– and all the different things authentic can mean– is any more or less relevant (or more or less “high school self-conscious”) than if the art is good or bad, meaningful or vacuous, tedious or fun. We can all politicize everything every which way, and we all have our preferences and priorities. But it is troubling that this generation gets exposed to so little music that is meaningful and ambitious. I resisted playing the Joni Mitchell card here– seems unfair, really, but somehow inevitable. Mitchell also works the territory of domestic relations, the female psyche, etc., but she does it so brilliantly and her music is gorgeous to listen to– exquisite lyrics– she’s got it all. Never saw her except on video and tv, but she can (or could) perform so beautifully live.
There’s a huge element of The Emperor Has No Clothes at work here. Putting Swiftian performers in the same category of “groundbreaking” just doesn’t fly, and it’s not fair to beat on the critics who point out that TS is not an artist on the level of Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin, Emmylou Harris, etc, all the way to singer-songwriters like Brittany Howard. And absolutely it’s healthy to question the critics who choose to treat performers working at the TS level as the heirs to Mitchell et al. I feel lucky to have lived through a time, however fleeting and long ago, when commercial and meaningful lined up, when “stoking the star maker machinery behind the popular song” put people like JM, AF, the Beatles etc on the radio 24×7. I don’t begrudge anyone who wants to listen to TS or Bieber or whoever else. We all like what we like, we all have our guilty pleasures and our favorite brand of kitsch. But don’t conflate the two, and don’t give up the hope that we’ll see another golden age in popular music.
Taylor Swift offends me as a young woman, a musician, and a thinking individual.
Your thoughts on Swiffy are right on. Blech. I would listen to an entire TS album, but my gag reflex just won’t let me.
Wait, are there 2 Swedes afflicted with substance abuse issues, or just one?
I think we can all agree, though: when it comes to takedowns, Mr. Moody is no Dale Peck.
I feel very sorry and embarrassed by the violent reaction you received from Taylor Swift fans. Part of the reason why we love her is because of her ability to say everything she needs to say, even if she faces criticism, and our response to your article was incredibly hypocritical. But I think it might be important to express where we are coming from. People don’t think the author is a misogynist because of the specific terms that he used (‘marrying up’ ect.) but the over all tone that Taylor was not worth his time because he did not understand or agree with her view, and then made no effort to try. I don’t think the author took the time to consider that much of Taylor’s earlier music was written when she was still a teenager, a view point that I’m sure the author has lost touch with by now. It is easy to dismiss her as a silly little girl selling a fantasy, but that is weak, and honestly bad journalism. It is this problem, common among male critics, that solidifies how important Taylor is to her fans.
I am a woman, nineteen this year, a feminist, college educated and I love Taylor Swift. I am a part of the large demographic that for some reason has just been discovered to be capable of deep thought. You all dismiss us, and industry has been satisfied to sell us bubble gum, hyper sexual nonsense for years, and we bought it, not because it’s us, but because it was the closest thing we had to a voice, to someone saying all of things we were experiencing. Women like me, raised in the South particularly, were taught that emotions were to be expressed demurely, privately. Anger was to channeled into witty comments, if at all, and tears were unacceptable unless you were at a sad movie with your boyfriend. Taylor shattered those limitations. Growing up I searched fruitlessly for an artist to say all of the things I couldn’t. Luckily I found solace in books, but other girls my age were not so lucky.
Taylor speaks for us, and though she started out young and a big naïve, Taylor has grown tremendously with her fans into adulthood, and that is exemplified beautifully on Red. Every girl feel heartache, anger, longing, and dismissing those feelings a juvenile or a ploy to gain mass appeal is close minded. Some of the most intelligent, well respected men wrote about the power of heartache and relationships. Just because the medium is not in his taste does not give the author the right to dismiss the ideas. And yes, she has become highly commercialized, but she has never lost her deep consideration for her fans.
I respect the author’s point of view and his right to his opinion, but he should consider the powerful cultural shift that Taylor has contributed to. She’s not pretending to be anything she’s not and that has value. And most importantly, she speaks for those who many don’t want to hear from, even in this day and age, and that is admirable from any musical perspective.
Too bad we can’t get this conversation back to Los Lobos and what an excellent live band they are. Of course, Taylor Swift sold more last month than they’ve probably ever sold, and I suppose I’m a misogynist for pointing this out. Swift Lovers: I do have some street cred: my eleven year old daughter did a great solo effort of “RED” for her talent show and I was very proud of her. The point? Taylor Swift isn’t that terrible. It’s music for 15 year olds, and it’s fine.
For the record, Natalie Imbruglia’s big hit was actually a cover of a song by Ednaswap, whose version is a lot grungier and has some legitimate resonance. It’s worth checking out.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHp7sq1Tzn0
I would first like to begin with saying that an opinion cannot be right or wrong. That is why it is an opinion and not a fact. Next, I would like to say that I am a 21 year old woman who enjoys most of Taylor Swifts music (I have to admit “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” annoys me greatly) but not because I feel it has substance. I think her music is catchy and fun to listen to. I personally feel that someone at our age (given she has two years on me) should be able to maintain a long term relationship and if she can’t, then she should spend a longer period of time being single and examining herself as opposed to repeatedly entering into relationships (especially ones that she may know are trouble from the get go) just to turn around and be “heart broken”, so much so that she immediately jumps into her next love affair, and write songs about the way she was treated. The way I see it, if every man you have dated has been horrible there is something in yourself that needs reexamining. I would also like to state that the idea of young women such as myself purposefully trying to “disgust you and ourselves” is a shocking one to me but everyone has their own way of dealing with their emotions and that just doesn’t happen to be mine. This is just my personal opinion, which as I stated previously cannot be right or wrong because I am not passing it off as factual.
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