What it is Like to Be a Taylor Swift Fan

  

Thomas Nagel once famously puzzled over the subjectivity of bats and I have, at the cost of much bafflement and wasted labor, learned that the taste of others, even human others of kith and kin to you culturally and ethnically, may be exactly as inaccessible. This is a question I might have given up on. For instance, I might have stopped wondering what the subjective experience of actually enjoying an artist like Taylor Swift or Celine Dion must be like. In like manner, there may be classical music fans who have given up trying to puzzle out the mental state called ‘not hating Schoenberg’ and what it must feel like to enjoy Pierrot Lunaire! Still, if one has students of a certain age it behooves one to understand what they like and why. Moreover, reading a review in The Slate of the latest Swift offering I feel challenged to say something for it was a very definite rebuke to all non-Swift fans and their lack of taste.[1] This reviewer claimed that not only was SHE a Taylor Swift fan but that I and all others like me were remiss in not being one. For the purposes of this piece I will assume that the author, Ilana Kaplan, is an actual reviewer and not a publicist or spokesperson. I will assume she really thinks that the reissue/remix of Swift’s 2012 record Red is a “…a masterclass in pop songwriting and poetry ahead of its time.” I assume also that she is being sincere and not merely flattering one obvious market for her piece in her claim that “…teen girls saw the genius of Swift from the beginning — how precisely the pop singer could capture every emotional detail of her life into a compelling manifesto” and that these same teen girls are “accepted now as arguably the best tastemakers”. By the way, this slight hedge is probably rhetorical. Ms. Kaplan does not, I suspect, think ANYTHING about Swift or her fans and their impeccable taste is ‘arguable’. Her conclusion, based on these recognized taste makers and their preferences, is that “Red wasn’t just an album—it was a pop evolution, one that shaped one of music’s biggest stars as we know her now. It not only laid the groundwork for Swift’s pivot genres, but it also paved the way for her to finally receive recognition as one of our best songwriters. Those who looked the other way the first time around—well, shame on you now.” 

‘One’ of our best song writers? Again, one feels that is a mere wave in the general direction of modesty. This is confirmed by the following claim. There is, she says, “pretty much nothing Swift can’t do at this point.” This is an astounding claim, if true, for I had never thought even once that she could play the sitar or compose a correct fugue. She has, though, ventured on the uncharted (for pop divas) territory of a ten-minute song. If Swift’s next project is a prog inspired concept record I will indeed be impressed though even that would not support the claim of near artistic omnipotence. I am quibbling here though for, of course, Ms. Kaplan is not really claiming Swift can do anything but that if there is something Swift can’t do, like play jazz harmonica, that thing must not be terribly important to acknowledged tastemakers. Swift is capable doing anything that is important or significant and if she can’t do something then that thing does not vitally matter anyway. Nor does Kaplan explicitly limit her claims by confining them to a genre. Swift, one gets the distinct impression, is not just the best commercial pop singer but simply the best singer for she does ‘music’ while other people do genres of music like jazz or folk. What Swift does is music and what those other losers do is music with a modifier and this, generally, is how we define someone’s privilege: white people are just people while black people are people with a color. I say this on the assumption that Kaplan thinks about other genres though there is no evidence she does: this may in fact be one defining feature of loyalty to a particular pop star. Part of being a TRUE fan of Swift is never to even think of comparing her abilities to those of Esperanza Spalding. Indeed, it entails avoiding the embarrassment of revealing you even know about Esperanza Spalding. If, as a young adult, I expressed a preference for AC/DC over King Crimson I would still have to explain the awkward fact that I knew and possibly cared who King Crimson was. A TRUE AC/DC fan would not know that and would hide it if he did! This, to be frank about one of my peeves when it comes to breathless inflated pop-music music writing, is the fascism of mass taste. 

So, should I be ashamed of not hailing Red as a masterpiece in either its first iteration or its current one? Have I been ignoring the best tastemakers of my day to my detriment and depriving myself of a satisfying aesthetic experience? Well, many people have tried over the years to shame me into liking certain things and into renouncing my love for certain others. I survived high school and never renounced my love of prog for the glories of hair metal in spite of the fact that in my school fights broke out for less. I am stubborn that way and if little girls, or little boys for that matter, do not recognize the genius of Coltrane or Webern I actually think that is a limitation on THEIR part. Be that as it may, I have decided that I MAY after all be stubbornly wrong and at fault in all of this. I MAY have been rightly shamed for allowing my prejudices to blind me to a contemporary masterpiece. I too may have dismissed Swift as ‘teenage girl music’ and this might reveal in me an un-thought ageism and sexism. Kaplan tells us: “Swift, by many, was written off as a twee singer-songwriter—a “woman-child”—straddling the lines of country and pop. The fact that Swift appealed so deeply to young girls (accepted now as arguably the best tastemakers) was deemed an Achilles Heel.” This could well be true and it could well be an injustice on the part of critics who dismiss Swift or others, like me, who have just casually ignored her.   

For this reason, I now am listening to the title track of Red. I have been challenged to judge it both as music AND (Kaplan, remember, does not shy from the word) poetry. Since this is so, I am happy to give it my unprejudiced attention if belatedly and shamefacedly. Because Kaplan has brought up poetry (and for no other reason) I will begin by examining it as such before going on to discuss it as music (something I am a bit less qualified to do). Well, how is it? Here is the opening line: “Loving him is like driving a new Maserati down a dead-end street.” Swift fans, I take it, are mostly intrigued by who the HE is in this line but it has been called poetry and I will judge it as such. Here, I must say, the song almost loses me for the ‘poet’ is doing two things that are completely at cross purposes. The purpose of this simile is to invite comparison between the singer’s experience and the listener's. You, the listener, will know how the singer feels by the comparison of that feeling to a common experience shared by both. Yet this attempt at shared feeling and commonality is immediately cancelled by name dropping an expensive car. I have never driven a Maserati down any kind of street and never will. Nor have the overwhelming majority of Swift’s fans. What then are we being asked to feel? The listener is being asked to feel what the singer feels AND to fantasize about the wealth and luxury of a noted celebrity and this, as an aesthetic effect, is incoherent, even weak and childish. The aspirational consumerist fantasy and the empathic identification with the artist and her experience do not co-exist happily in this image. One can’t help but feel that while she is inviting us in Swift is also putting us very firmly in our socio-economic place. The reason for this awkward image may be commercial for Maserati, for all I know of how these things work, may have paid for this product placement but I will be charitable and assume that this image is a mere poetic misfire. One that the succeeding lines “Faster than the wind and passionate as sin” are not quite strong enough to recover though I like the rhyme.  

Well, not an auspicious start but let’s see if things get better: “Loving him is like trying to change your mind/Once you're already flying through the free fall/Like the colors in autumn, so bright, just before they lose it all”. This, actually, is better, much better. The internal rhyme of trying and flying is deft and the image of free falling from a great height and trying to change course is a bit closer to ordinary imagination than driving an impossibly expensive sports car. The colors of autumn as an image of the ephemera of experience has appeared in a million poets and will appear in a million more and are employed no worse here than in a million other places. It is a cliché, true, but not the worst cliché so I give it a pass. We continue: “Losing him was blue like I'd never known/Missing him was dark gray, all alone/Forgetting him was like tryna know somebody you never met/But loving him was red.” Losing him was blue like I’d never known is no doubt what Swift says after EVERY breakup but lovers do dramatize so I give it a pass. The movement from the blue of parting to the grey of loneliness and longing to the recollected ‘red’ of fiery but brief passion is actually effective. A well-managed gradation of colors! It is not Wallace Stevens but it is not terrible either and in the context of sung poetry works nicely. I chalk this line up as a win for Swift. 

Next up the following: “Touching him was like realizing all you ever wanted/Was right there in front of you/Memorizing him was as easy as knowing all the words/to your old favorite song.” Again, lovers tell lies. Swift clearly wants many things besides touching her lover (like expensive cars) but ‘you are all I want’ is the oldest lie in the book of love poetry and I will not fault Swift for telling it one more time. Memorizing him means, I suppose, means memorizing his likes and dislikes and other facets of his personality though this word is a bit weak. The next line, though, is bathetic. The easy recall of a favorite and familiar song clashes clumsily with the intensity of the ‘red’ love affair as well as with the dark passionate images used throughout the song. It is too homey an image for an affair that claims to be so torrid and searing in its aftermath that the singer sees ‘red’.

The next stanza is another fail sadly: “Fighting with him was like trying to solve a crossword/And realizing there's no right answer/Regretting him was like wishing you never found out/That love could be that strong.” Again the poet reaches for a simile and comes up empty (maybe Swift should avoid this figure of speech). It is the very nature of a cross word puzzle that is has a solution. Though we have all felt frustration at the intractable problems of life no one has EVER felt this frustration because it does not exist (except, I suppose, through very rare printing errors that the NY Times would have to profusely apologize for). If one wants to use a simile to convey a mental state one cannot use as its basis something so rare and anomalous as a faulty crossword puzzle.  As for the second line it is clunky, but, does no further damage to the song (if it does not exactly help it either). For this reason, I will skip it over as, to me, it says nothing that is not said better in other verses of the song. Now to the next stanza: “Remembering him comes in flashbacks and echoes/ Tell myself, "It's time now, gotta let go"/But moving on from him is impossible/When I still see it all in my head/ In burning red.” ‘Echoes’ and ‘let go’ is a nice round rhyme with its chiming long o’s. Score one more for Swift. Plus, remembering swift scenes and flashes seems psychologically plausible for an affair of this sort and makes an effective image and seeing them in the color red (the color of passion and of blood) is almost a hallucinatory effect and strong for what one expects in a pop song. Well done Taylor Swift! Now nothing of this seems in any way to advance the frontiers of poetry and far from being ahead of its time, as Kaplan claims, it is probably far behind what artists like Dylan, Cohen or Joni Mitchell have done. Still, it is no disgrace to its author either and if teen girl taste makers enjoy this as poetry I can see why. More importantly, if this gets teen girl taste makers into poetry I think that is grand. I DO NOT, alas, see anything in this poetry that justifies shaming those who don’t swoon over it and to that extent Kaplan has clearly written a puff piece no doubt for all the pecuniary and professional reasons that people write puff pieces (and I fault NO ONE for doing what it takes to make a good living).

The next question though concerns the music which should, ideally, work together with the words to create a strong and unified aesthetic effect. Now I am a working poet so I am a somewhat better judge of that. I am not a working musician and have no background in theory or criticism. Still, I have listened to a LOT of things in a LOT of genres and have a firm if technically untutored sense of taste. This I developed in open defiance of the ‘best tastemakers’ in my family and school. I have been yelled at and threatened over music as much if not more than any individual living and when Kaplan, here and there, flashes a bit of girl bullying at non-Swiftians I am the last person to be impressed. Now, as for Swift’s music, Kaplan dumps an entire thesaurus on it. It is variously blistering, pulsating, delicate, kaleidoscopic. Its sonic palette is boundary pushing and chameleon like in its genre bending complexity. Here I have to rain on the Swiftian parade. I have heard Stockhausen’s Kontakte and Opus. 111 by Beethoven so I cannot regard a Swift record as pushing ANY sonic boundary that has not been pushed much farther by others. If only Kaplan had added ‘by the standards of a commercial pop record’ I might be fine with this claim but she does not. Her claims at this point seem to be about ‘music’ not just ‘pop music’ because commercial pop-music, as I pointed out above, is music that needs no modifier. Stockhausen does not pass muster with the crucial taste-makers but is only for academics and specialists who are by definition weird and isolated! At any rate, even this more limited claim falls to the ground when one considers Sergeant Pepper or Prince or, for that matter, Bjork. 

But, all hyperbole aside, is ‘Red’ good music? Actually I think it is. It is polished, professional and tuneful. It has a banjo and nicely ticking percussion! Still, it is music that is moving within very narrowly defined confines of taste. Everything has, to my ears, a quality of being ‘just so much and not more’ like the brief but tasteful soloing of the guitarist. I suppose what I’m saying is that my ears, after 53 years of unfettered exploration, have been bent too dramatically in too many directions to feel any particular excitement at a sound as glossy and clean as this. It is a bit like wall paper. In fact, it is ear candy. Now, if someone were capable of musical analysis (I am not) they might well find things of interest in the rhythm and harmony of this piece. They might, in fact, uncover the subtle musical tricks that MAKE this song so glossy and accessible. In other words, its surface may conceal a good deal of musical art as good pop music often does. I, however, can only judge the surface not the sub-structure and I judge it to be perfectly fine for what it is. This, of course, implies that I think there are other things greater in kind than a good pop song and that does not seem to be Kaplan’s approach. In her mind Swift seems to be at the summit of the best kind of thing musically. The kind of thing the ‘best tastemakers’ judge. Well, we will just have to agree to disagree. If I conceded that ‘Red’ were the best pop-song possible, the pop song than which a greater cannot be conceived, that would still not make me enjoy it unselfconsciously OR be ashamed at not enjoying it unselfconsciously. I think there are better things than pop-songs musically. Moreover, I think there are better poets at work even in the pop field like the superb P.J. Harvey. This may be partly down to me not being American for in that great nation the demotic is the presumed standard against which the deviations are measured and, where the demos is concerned, Swift has carried the day. But, as for that 10-minute song (All too Well) I have to say I beginning to like it in a way that is almost spontaneous and not studied. That, I suppose, can be considered progress for someone as old and out of touch with tastemakers as me!                                                                             

    

                                                               

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[1] https://slate.com/culture/2021/11/taylor-swift-red-taylors-version-review.html?fbclid=IwAR2onmIqcS5oAjwOQ1lRVbBPDTf1nWQ8odk5yiH22Ajjvj8jNrChzAmewgc. It is not surprising to find, underneath her apparent bravado, that Kaplan has a distinct inferiority complex about her love for Swift. I should, then, clear the air on one crucial point. It is absolutely permissible to love an artist whether or not that artist is the greatest of all time or merely a solid craftsperson. I love all kinds of things I don’t think are imperishable art or groundbreaking music or poetry and feel no defensiveness on that score. Nor, I think, should anybody else.