Taylor Swift Sucks But So Does Everything Else

One generation's stimulant is the next generation’s sedative.

I’ll click on any headline that promises to trash Taylor Swift. Elephantine portions of adoration, artistic credit, and wealth, seem to have been arbitrarily allocated to her. So it’s fun to read people who are likewise unimpressed or aggravated. But for me, the catharsis is lost if the writer makes the mistake of still believing that Taylor Swift is especially bad. Because that isn’t quite right either. Anna Van Praagh from The Standard writes:

As her Eras Tour gathers ever-increasing gravity-defying momentum, I find myself wondering what on earth the ubiquity and homogeneity of her music says about the state of popular music today.

For sure, Taylor’s music is unremarkable. I’ll say that from what I’ve heard, I don’t think all of her music is even that good for the genre it occupies. I understand why Shake it Off went to the top, but Anti-Hero has a flatness to it.

However, when someone refers to the “popular music today,” they’ve usually just revealed that they aren’t interested in objectively appraising the culture that’s imprinted on them. Somehow for these people, all the good music—movies, junk food and Simpsons episodes, too—started coming out when they were 11 and all stopped after they turned 16. Older stuff seeps into the cultural diet of the youth, but kids that age are intensely and uniquely exposed to new releases. The music you learn in junior high and high school become permanent aural stimulants. It’s difficult to fathom that your stimulant is the next generation’s sedative. And then you’re the Mr. Skinner meme: “No, it’s the children who are wrong.” 

This chart demonstrates the extent to which people believe all the good shit came out just in time for them to be teenagers. These people must feel so lucky to somehow, improbably, have been forming their cultural identity right at popular music’s qualitative zenith. “No, no, I get it, everyone thinks that. But popular music really is getting worse!” It’s not. There’s some bad stuff, there’s some good stuff. There are performers who have more than they deserve, and there are performers who have astronomically more than they deserve. But this has always been the case.  So if your argument is that Taylor Swift isn’t as good as [your favorite pop star from the past] then you’ve lost me. Because my critiques could extend to literally every performer who was mentioned in Van Praagh’s list of Taylor’s musical superiors.

Admittedly the intellectually challenged of my generation also embraced Take That and the Spice Girls, but the rest of us also had The Prodigy, Elastica, The Cure, Blur, Pulp, The Smiths, The Stone Roses, Nirvana. Crucially, we had so many options of what we could like and dislike and so much of it was alternative. Not only was the music thought-provoking and imaginative, but the lyrics were meaningful and caught the spirit of a generation.

All of the bands and musical acts listed here exist within a narrow range of standardized music. From Madonna to Nirvana to the Spice Girls, all of this relies on a predictable set of mostly diatonic chords, simple melodies, and rhythmic uniformity.

There’s nothing wrong with this. Pop music is cool. But the fact remains that any Spice Girls song could be done in the style of the Smiths and vice versa. I haven’t cataloged all of their music but I’m going to guess that the songs of both groups contain verses, choruses, and bridges with maybe no exception? All end on the tonic chord. Drum fills mark section changes. Neither group has music that is especially rhapsodic, or contrapuntal, or rich in motivic development.

This is not to say that there aren’t musical tendencies in the writing. Of course The Smiths, The Cure, Taylor Swift or whoever, have different tastes. Each writer is drawn to different musical gestures, chords they are more or less likely to use, notes they feel compelled to write, etc. So I’ll concede that not every song on the radio is just a chassis for any band who wants it—Smells Like Teen Spirit in the style of the Spice Girls might not be the most idiomatic. But they are still musical siblings.

If you want to hear proof that popular music is mostly interchangeable, go to YouTube or TikTok and look for the niche musicians who do things like All The Singles Ladies in the style of Blink 182 or Radiohead’s Creep in 10 styles. The covers are definitely displays of musicianship. These people skillfully synthesize two pieces of music so that the essence of both are obvious. Covers like these also showcase the standardization of popular music. And it’s a standardization that popular music has possessed for generations.

In fairness to Van Praagh, she was emphasizing lyrical content, which is easier for most people to judge than musical content. In general, I think lyrics are the most substantive way that one pop song can differentiate itself from another. And it’s really the only way a pop song can become meaningful.

Growing up, we had Madonna, who combined electrifying performances with a truly trailblazing agenda of barrier-breaking subject-matter. She embraced gay pride, sex, challenged the Catholic church, supported the Aids movement [sic], and completely and utterly reinvented the way society perceived women. Her music was interesting, experimental and varied.

Completely and utterly reinvented the way society perceived women? That maybe is giving Madonna, who used to wear a belt buckle that read “BOY TOY,” a bit too much credit. Van Praagh continues later in the piece:

Swift’s music sounds to me like what I would listen to if I had the intellect of a very small worm. Not only is it uninteresting, repetitive and entirely basic, her lyrics are brain-numbingly banal. Take the following: “You smoked, then ate seven bars of chocolate/We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist/I scratch your head, you fall asleep/Like a tattooed golden retriever.”

It sounds like the passage from this Taylor Swift song is a wistful telling of an evening with a new boyfriend. Could it have been written by a 10th grader? Of course. But for all the time Van Praagh spends declaring Taylor Swift’s appeal shouldn’t extend beyond invertebrates, this is the only evidence that she provides of Taylor’s musical lameness. But most pop songs fall apart on their poetry alone. Take away the musical element and international mega hits turn into junior high writing assignments. Take the following:

Look around, everywhere you turn is heartache

It's everywhere that you go (look around)

You try everything you can to escape

The pain of life that you know (life that you know)

When all else fails and you long to be

Something better than you are today

I know a place where you can get away

It's called a dance floor

And here's what it's for, so

That is from Madonna’s “Vogue.” It seems pretty banal/basic/vacuous to me. No single line is clever or even necessary. The number of lines is dictated by the harmonic rhythm. They are perfectly suited to a feet-moving pop song, but let’s not pretend anything more. If any power is to be found, it’s in understanding the meaning of the song as a whole.

Van Praagh is right about Madonna highlighting, and thus normalizing, things in the orbit of LGBTQ. Voguing was a staple of the black gay club scene of the time in which people would strike poses imitating models and stars. Madonna advocated for gay rights, held AIDS fundraisers, and helped bring these things every little bit more into the mainstream. So in that sense her music provoked thought. But not for any quality intrinsic to the music or lyricism.

Taylor Swift has also been an LGBTQ advocate. She’s donated large sums to LGBTQ causes, and worked advocacy into her music. I don’t think she’s championed gay causes to the same degree Madonna had, but this is just one thread connecting Taylor Swift and Madonna.

Another between them is that they are both, as Van Praagh puts it, “capitalist constructs.” Money and wealth are so much a part of discussions about Taylor Swift. Whether it’s the cost of her tours, what she did for the economy of the area she just played in, maybe the cost (carbon or otherwise) of her private jet travel, Taylor is of course a capitalist. She’s a billionaire who does commercials for AT&T, Apple, Capital One, and Coke.

Through lobbying and political contributions, these companies oppose any progressive values that Taylor Swift possesses. Coke has given money to anti-LGBTQ legislators and AT&T has given to legislators who oppose LGBTQ causes and who support voter suppression bills. So on and so forth. Taylor got 35,000 people registered to vote, but, ya know, does that balance out her corporate advocacy?

Madonna similarly was/is a corporate participant. In her heyday she did ads for Mitsubishi and Pepsi. Later was The Gap, and H&M. She also did the theme for the James Bond film Die Another Day (in my opinion the worst theme song of the Brosnan era, also not a franchise known for its feminism). And most recently she appeared in a bank commercial.

Using Madonna to highlight Taylor Swift’s weakness as an artist is awesome because they are just generationally distinct versions of each other. The thing is that once a celebrity passes middle age, if their mist still hangs in the air, they’re canonized. Which is how you end up with people who think it’s just plain ridiculous to dismiss Madonna’s music (or whoever’s) as any old pop music.

So yes, Taylor Swift sucks. A lot of her music is dumb and her fans are annoying. But her music is no more arbitrarily beloved or inconsequential than any other pop music. Thankfully, it all eventually gets swallowed by cultural oblivion. It’s hard to hear, but your favorite band is probably just as inconsequential as your taciturn teen’s favorite band. You’ll never connect with it because you didn’t have a concentration of it banged into your ears when you were turning over into personhood. And one day your teen will lament the fact that they don’t make music like her favorite band anymore. Thus continuing the cycle of who gives a shit.