Taylor Swift as blurry jpeg

the person who has come up with the single greatest body of pop songwriting in the 21st century is also its most popular performer

Taylor Swift would speak at the N.Y.U. commencement this month and receive an honorary doctorate of fine arts… Past recipients… Bill Clinton, Aretha Franklin…

Swift has encountered the type of controversies that would destroy most pop stars’ careers and acclaim. But at age 31, she has never been more awarded or acclaimed as a singer-songwriter… This [college] course proposes to deconstruct both the appeal and aversions to Taylor Swift through close readings of her music and public discourse as it relates to her own growth as an artist and a celebrity.

a work of High Culture, however inept, is an expression of feelings, ideas, tastes, visions that are idiosyncratic and the audience similarly responds to them as individuals… [Out of pop culture and high culture, a] whole middle culture has come into existence and it threatens to absorb both its parents…

In [pop] the trick is plain – to please the crowd by any means. But [mid work] has it both ways; it pretends to respect the standards of High Culture while in fact it waters them down

Pop music is good. Songwriting teams are good. Precision is good. Reptilian strategising is good. Working your arse off is good. People liking things is good. Artists making money is good. Admitting you are a trash-fire human being is good. And reinventing yourself is good.

So why does Taylor Swift make me feel like I have ants beneath my skin?

I think it’s because I am seeing a machine (a series of large corporations and 40+ ghostwriters and designers and lawyers 6) represent itself as a singular human being I am to empathise with 14. Then a large part of society greets this machine as an artist, like a line of ducklings imprinting on a combine harvester.

Call the machine TS. The interesting part is that Swift the human built TS the machine and to some extent controls it. A self-manufactured pop star: Swift obscures the machine, equivocates, and feeds it vast hosts of people (fans, co-writers, arrangers, choreographers, crew, squad, boyfriends, enemies, bloggers). The project is reflexive: it makes songs about its own controversies, songs which lead to more fame, fame which automatically produces more controversies.

TS presents itself as Swift. It does perform characters explicitly (e.g. Cinderella, Rebekah Harkness), but the machine TS mostly pretends to be the woman Swift in various forms. It adapts to audience and times: innocence-coded (with a twang) for Nashville then; demisexual-coded (with FKA-sighing) for the glossies now; BPD-coded (and drawling) for the extremely online now. A persecution complex (and diphthongs) for everyone. 16

That’s half of it; the other half is your incredible overestimation of the output. TS songs are moderately catchy, (recently) moderately perverse, but expertly ape The Current Thing (Shania Twain / Faith Hill / Kelly Clarkson / Gaga / Kesha / Lana / Lorde / HAIM / Chvrches / FKA Twigs / Billie Eilish / whoever it is now). But TS is noticeably flatter than any of these. 3

Why does the music’s reception matter if the music doesn’t matter? Well, I dislike things that pretend to be deep when they’re not. Things which pretend to be personal are on tricky aesthetic ground. Entertainment is fine but not when it stands in place of art. We used to be iffy about parasocial relationships, corporate machines, being played.

I realise now that Swift is a kind of artist – but the art is not music, it’s marketing. Empire-building. Trend sniffing. Image management, customer relationship management, and hiring. She weathered culture war struggle sessions completely fine; people have repeatedly announced her demise; critics have bleated about the derivativeness and hollowness - and yet here she is. These feats require intelligence, deep cultural awareness, and cold blood. She bucks claims about the death of the monoculture.

So if the music is uninteresting the phenomenon isn’t. She plays the world like a fiddle. How?

Poptimism imperial

Quincy Jones: We need more songs, man. Fucking songs, not hooks.
INTERVIEWER: Some people consider her the great songwriter of our age.
QJ: [laughs]. Whatever crumbles your cookie.
INTERVIEWER: What’s missing?
QJ: Knowing what you’re doing…
INTERVIEWER: Plenty of people talk as though Taylor Swift has great songs.
QJ: But they don’t know, man. They don’t know. I’ve come and gone through seven decades of this shit. Seen all that. Seen how that works. Ignorance is no thing.

Let people enjoy things

– Proverb

It’s uncomfortable to be out here proclaiming about Art vs Pop; 10 years ago I was on the other side, of the poptimists (who said that pop can be good and worth talking about). I welcome us no longer pretending that pop music is bad music; I welcome us no longer doing violence to our own taste.

But as usual the revolutionaries ran to excess in their imperial era: poptimism was originally just the claim that pop music can be good – but it morphed into a relativist land grab: that all pop is good. Sucked up all the critical oxygen. Pop’s aims are vastly different from those of art music, and I want some space for the latter. Midcult machines like TS steal this space 2.

(Pitchfork, once a caricature of thoughtless hipster antipathy to the mainstream, made the Red reissue an album of the year. Until 2017 they were able to totally ignore her, never reviewing any of it.)

Scaruffi’s radical conservatism:

Art Music differs from Commercial Music the way a Monet painting differs from IKEA furniture. Although the border is frequently fuzzy… [we can still say that] being an art musician is a different kind of job, more similar to the job of the scientific researcher (and the old-fashioned inventor) than to the job of the popular entertainer…

The goal of an art musician is, first and foremost, to do what s/he feels is important and, secondly, to secure a place in the history of human civilization… Art music knows no stylistic boundaries: the division in classical, jazz, rock, hip hop and so forth still makes sense for commercial music (it basically identifies the sales channel)

Macdonald, quoted above, carries a lot of baggage about the outsized importance of novels and elite cultural stewardship. But we don’t need any of that to take the key point: pure pop is better than pop which is pretending to be art. (Yes, some art music finds commercial success. But as a side effect of being itself.)

There’s an interesting overlap here with class theory. No, honestly: the signalling game is now genre-omnivorous and you distinguish yourself by liking only the “consecrated” (high-status) instances of each genre. This is much more fun and varied than the old Classical hauteur, but it also clears the path for commercial machines like TS.

The economics of art

Once something costs $140m to make, certain forms of art become impossible. You cannot take risks, aesthetic or physical. You cannot improvise. You must appeal broadly, probably too broadly to be yourself, unless your soul is already a common denominator. Logistics, an iron constraint on vision.

This is why I put up with bad production and sloppy musicianship: the higher the budget, the less likely I am to see any true experiment and idiosyncracy and deviance, which is what I want from art and often from entertainment too. Music is very cheap compared to other artforms (barely a million per hit), which is why we still see a modicum of experiment in popular songs.

I think the usual mechanism is that the execs meddle to ensure that they recoup their investment. And committee art is generally inferior because it takes us further from honesty and idiosyncracy. TS has sponsors and “partners” (investors) to please 8.

the parasocial

[Fan’s] devotion to Taylor Swift runs so deep that she feels as if she can trust her like a friend. After the pop star encouraged fans to vote in the 2018 midterm elections, Ms. Smith registered. The 23-year-old’s most recent rite of passage — getting her first credit card — was also prompted by the singer.

people on tumblr and twitter really don’t like to separate art from the artist, for example the artist Adele, or Taylor Swift. Everything has to be about the person Taylor Swift, and the kabbalistic implications of pieces of the lyrics. It’s not enough for people to like or not like her music. It’s all about Taylor Swift existing in the public eye, criticism is criticism of her person, her life… even the posts that criticise… feel painfully parasocial.

This part of the machine is really interesting.

The romantic singer-songwriter tradition says that music is good to the extent that it honestly expresses one person’s feelings. So how can it be bad that TS talks about Swift’s love life, and that people respond to it?

First: TS is simultaneously an optimised hit factory which tracks chart trends and creates products in response, and a gossip mag analogue. The songs are more explicit about its celebrity subjects than past love / revenge songs. The result is a product to a greater degree than everything else is now a product. (You lot would go parasocial regardless of how private Swift was - but as it is it’s cultivated in a way which makes me run screaming.)

Another is that melding public and private destroys the private. Living in public prevents you being yourself (think of the self-censorship alone). This undermines the romantic artist story a second way 9. And like you can read her diary.

The music is generally a play for sympathy or (even more sympathetic!) a revenge fantasy. Possibly these bids are even sincere – one imagines it’s quite therapeutic to have a million people cheering you. But the one-sidedness makes me disdain them (e.g. recall the absurd premise of “Reputation”, that she is a victim and needs defenders).

Yet another strat: the pretence that TS is uncool, the victim of snobbery, mean girls, haters, paps, hacks, misogyny. (She’s uncool, like you. She’s bullied, like you. Being a fan of her is brave and kind.) Apparently this has an actual referent in Swift’s misfit teen experience, but it becomes a grotesque pose in the light of TS’ global supremacy. A side effect of the pretence is pre-empting essays like this. Haters are going to hate.

authenticity

If there was a single millisecond of spontaneity in the entire evening, I missed it.

By chance, I’d found myself having dinner with a former acquaintance of Swift’s who offhandedly described her as “calculating.” This is the only moment during our interview when Swift appears remotely flustered. She really, really hates the word calculating…

[Swift: ] “ ‘Am I shooting from the hip?’ Would any of this have happened if I was? … You can be accidentally successful for three or four years. Accidents happen. But careers take hard work.”

She is a snake in the most positive way. She sheds her skin and becomes a new version of herself to fit in with today’s culture. You never know what will come next, which is what keeps her fans so engaged.

it’s a little foolish to knock Taylor Swift for basing her brand on authentic teenage experiences that she never actually had for the same reason that it’s naive to point out that William Shakespeare wasn’t an Italian teenager willing to die for love; the art is separate from the artist, and the better the artist the less likely they actually have any personal experience in what they’re arting.

The machine is most visible in its precision and repetition (Sittenfeld notices it in the exact reproduction, every show, of that giggle from “Shake It Off”). But James Brown was much more of a dick about precision, and I don’t view him as a lesser artist because of it.

Authenticity is a very stupid idea in a lot of ways. It’s ahistorical - e.g. much of the Italian menu canon didn’t exist 100 years ago, and some are American adaptations, but the recipes are now fiercely gatekept as the essence of Italian culture. It prevents innovation. It has made some great artists superstitiously avoid money (or kill themselves) for fear of becoming inauthentic. But look at the dominant alternative!

(One difference between Shakespeare writing about Veronese gang kids and TS writing about high school kids is that Shakey wasn’t pretending to be a Veronese gang kid. I can’t improve on this analysis of how the TS image is engineered.)

The most interesting things about Swift were harder to discover: she’s a sort of high school dropout; she started her career at 13 as a genuine social misfit; she remains a massive hustler who doesn’t seem to regret her child-star path, and who outdoes any cupidinous rapper re: stacks 5. Her re-recording her back catalogue is simultaneously a highly original act of independence and profiteering laziness. (Throughout this piece I’ve had to check myself whenever I go to say that TS is only a scary money machine. Scary money machines do not make this much money!)

A microcosm of pop’s appropriation

Pop as a whole is obviously larger and more hegemonic than little old TS: it ate gospel, it ate country, it ate jazz, it ate rock, it ate punk, it ate hip-hop, it ate various weird obtuse electronic genres, it ate lo-fi. It wears their shucked skins whenever it likes.

TS is just one little corner of this larger machine; TS only works at all because of pop’s debasement of the “indie” category over the last 20 years. “Indie” began not as an aesthetic category but an economic category, meaning “not a machine product”. Admittedly, your choosing this economic niche meant you weren’t very interested in being popular, and so “indie” in practice connoted a cluster of intensely personal weird rock. But “indie” now means “has guitars and vaguely depressed vocals” and is extremely prominent among corporate releases - overproduced lo-fi - pensive strumming with no thoughts. (The upside of this debasement is to make pop larger: irony, self-doubt and negativity are now options for hitmakers, and this makes the charts less monotonous.)

For all Swift’s grinding and shrewdness, TS is just a splinter of the same spontaneous order that created Britney, Katy Perry, Demi Lovato, Halsey, Meghan Trainor, Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez. 11 But they aren’t out here being given a PhD in fine arts.

Polymorphousness

David Bowie turned marketing into the essence of his art. All great phenomena of popular music, from Elvis Presley to the Beatles, had been, first and foremost, marketing phenomena… With Bowie… art and marketing become one… Bowie was… the heir, no matter how perverted, of Andy Warhol’s pop art… He [made underground transgressive art into] precisely what [it] had been designed to fight: a commodity.

Whatever you are upset about, the poet laureate of this generation has got a song somewhere in her mega-oeuvre describing that precise feeling.

“why do you always make her sound like a bundle of chitinous plates and spines tightly wrapped in human skin”

because her superpower is making you think she’s you

Most machines stop iterating once they find a hypersuccessful selling point. TS is thus in a rare category along with Bowie and Madonna: the red queens. TS found massive success by presenting as a chaste country girl; a stadium dance-pop star running family-friendly S&M; an oversexed indie grrl; a politically-aware ally; a goth-lite-lite bedroom-recording-studio murmurer …

Bowie pulled off a less-corporate, more-high-culture version of the TS trick 50 years ago and I love him for it - because his songs are, at the very least, interesting and aimed at more than pleasing me.

He is the great artist of surfaces; he changed style so often because there was nothing underneath. (He was also thoughtful enough that we should credit him with intentional rebellion against the pop/art and fake/authentic spectrums.) The difference is his quality and prescience: he managed to pre-empt glam, prog, vanilla funk, punk, AOR, new wave, and Online. He was a leading indicator, where TS is lagging.

Madonna is a much better fit; the constant try-hard iteration, the artful use of superficiality, sex, and the celeb racket. The lauded versatility ultimately boiling down to a couple of flavours of pop.

Where will TS be in 20 years? Bowie’s fate or Madonna’s? 7 (Madonna also had 10 no.1 albums, but aside from a couple of eternal singles it’s fading into the nostalgia noise level.)

Also: God knows what TS or its successor will be like when augmented with actual machines. Maybe we will come to see TS as clumsy broadcast propaganda compared to the coming personalised midculture.

It would not amaze me if this post ended up feeding TS in its way (bloggers have been useful to it before). What a machine!

You, with your words like knives
And swords and weapons that you use against me
You, with your voice like nails on a chalkboard…
I can see you years from now in a bar
Talking over a football game
With that same big loud opinion
But nobody’s listening
Washed up and ranting about the same old bitter things