Country Goes Pop
When Taylor Swift dropped her first country album at the tender age of 16, it made a shocking appearance on the Billboard 200. Yes, Swift’s early work demonstrated precocious lyricism, but not many could have predicted her meteoric rise. After promoting four albums to country radio, Swift’s 2014 release 1989 marked her official transition to the pop genre, expanding her audience considerably. Since her eponymous debut album in 2006, she has risen to pop stardom, recently selling out the 2023 Eras Tour in a matter of hours. Fans anxiously waited in Ticketmaster queues– and those who weren’t lucky enough to score tickets watched the Eras Tour feature length film in theaters. Swift’s impact as an artist and her presence in the cultural zeitgeist can not be denied, but as with many pop artists, a small, vocal sect of the population finds her music utterly unbearable. Are the so-called “haters” pretentious? Do we (yes, myself included) just hate to see women and girls have fun? The case can be made, sure, but it's also entirely possible that we just do not enjoy Taylor Swift’s music. And as we are subjected to it more and more, our distaste for it grows.
The Fan Base
Like Rick and Morty fans foaming at the mouth over szechuan sauce in 2017, Taylor Swift’s fans give her a bad name. Many fans imply – even insist – that it is misogynistic to criticize Swift’s work. Try comparing, for example, her catalog to that of any other female artist– and you might be accused of “pitting women against each other.” In her podcast Perspectives of Pop Culture, Lindsay Pineiro asserts that, “The best way to test if a girl is a girl’s girl and if you can trust her, is to say ‘What do you think about Taylor Swift?’ If they have a visceral negative reaction… if you’re like a girly, and you have a visceral negative reaction, I’m sorry– you need to reevaluate. You’re not a girl’s girl.”
Indeed, we (Pineiro included) have been socialized into patriarchy, which likely does influence our taste and sensibilities, for better or worse. But the irony of Pineiro claiming feminism while policing other women’s performance of womanhood is not lost on me. Darshita Goyal puts it perfectly in her piece Does It Matter If Taylor Swift’s A Girl’s Girl?:
“Through overwhelming patterns of ‘othering’ and looking down upon a certain brand of women, the [girl’s girl] trend embroils itself in the very misogyny that it was hoping to dismantle”
The term “girl’s girl” is accompanied by a new set of rules and regulations for women – rules which, for the chronically online, are apparently available on Tik Tok. In order to comply with these rules, do Swifties expect us to blindly support every woman, or every idea that a woman has, simply because she is a woman? An artist’s identity is certainly relevant – it influences her perspective, her message, her audience – but if feminism is about equality between the sexes, then surely any capable woman’s work should also be evaluated based on its merit, rather than her identity alone.
The Feminist Arc
Perhaps we can trace the fan base’s feminist narrative back to Taylor Swift’s uncomfortable run-in with Kanye West at the VMAs in 2009. When a teenaged Swift walked on stage to accept her award and was interrupted by a drunken West grabbing the mic out of her hands, of course those of us with a conscience sympathized. Swift had the grace to publicly forgive West, but he later referenced the event in his 2016 hit song “Famous”:
For all my Southside niggas that know me best
I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex
Why? I made that bitch famous (Goddamn)
I made that bitch famous
For all the girls that got dick from Kanye West
If you see 'em in the streets give 'em Kanye's best
Why? They mad they ain't famous (Goddamn)
They mad they still nameless (Talk that talk, man)
Though West reportedly discussed the song with Swift before its release, based on Swift's response, it's possible the lyrical content may not have come up. As she accepted the Grammy award for Album of the Year in 2016, Swift addressed the lyrics in an impassioned speech:
“As the first woman to win Album of the Year twice, I want to say to all the young women out there: there are going to be people along the way who will try to undercut your success or take credit for your accomplishments or your fame, but if you just focus on the work and you don’t let those people sidetrack you, someday when you get where you’re going, you’ll look around and you will know that it was you and the people who love you…”
Swift directly addresses young women in the speech, indicating her status as a role model to women and girls. She was drawn into a feud with Kanye West as a 19 year-old newcomer, and the conflict, especially Kanye’s sexist lyrics, demonstrate the adversity she has encountered as a woman in the music industry. She was justified in calling out Kanye West during her speech (the man needs more close people in his life to call him out, or to just generally tell him "no").
The Grammy acceptance speech was a genuine girl-power moment, but perhaps her most defiant and courageous undertaking has been re-recording her early work, which unfortunately came under Scooter Braun’s possession in 2019. In a Tumblr post, Swift described the Scooter Braun deal as a “worst case scenario.” Big Machine Records, the label which released Swift’s first album, betrayed her in the Scooter Braun sale. She wrote:
“When I left my masters in Scott [the CEO of Big Machine's] hands, I made peace with the fact that eventually he would sell them. Never in my worst nightmares did I imagine the buyer would be Scooter. Any time Scott Borchetta has heard the words ‘Scooter Braun’ escape my lips, it was when I was either crying or trying not to. He knew what he was doing; they both did. Controlling a woman who didn’t want to be associated with them. In perpetuity. That means forever.”
Swift signed her Tumblr post “sad and grossed out” – and any woman who has been controlled by a man in some way or another can probably relate. She faced a seemingly impossible situation, and through re-recording her work, found a way to take back control. Here’s one thing that the Swifties have got right: Taylor Swift is a strong, powerful woman. Her hard work and her bravery in the face of adversity warrant respect. It is okay to acknowledge that and also dislike her music.
The Psychology of Pop Music
So… what makes Taylor Swift’s music unbearable? If you have heard Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime” a handful of times, you likely understand that hearing the same phrase repeated on a loop, although comfortably predictable at first, can get a little irritating. This is just one example of how popular music can be repetitive. Often, pop songs are composed of four repeating chords. They have repeating choruses and lyrics, song structures, and even repeating themes. In Over and Over: Exploring Repetition in Popular Music, Olivier Julien and Christophe Levaux posit:
“One explanation for our tendency to relisten to music can be found in psychological literature on the ‘mere exposure effect.’ This shows that people prefer aesthetic stimuli that they have encountered before... It is a common experience to dislike a song on first hearing, but come to like it after multiple replays… At some point, though, monotony and listening fatigue set in; eventually, we crave something different… Soon after the point where liking begins to dip, a listener will presumably engage in fewer and fewer rehearings, because each successive hearing will cause a reduction in preference” (153-155).
Where does this leave folks who never preferred the music to begin with? Taylor Swift’s music is ubiquitous and unavoidable. With each repeated listen, especially against one’s will, the distaste grows. In Over and Over, Julien and Levaux even cite Swift’s “You Belong With Me” as an example of the most commonly used song structure (figure below).
To be clear, Taylor Swift is not the only artist using this formula. Formulaic song-writing is a feature of most popular music. For example, the verse-chorus song form took off in the 1960s and saw "widespread and extensive use, such that by the early 1980s, verse-chorus forms account[ed] for 100 percent of the #1 Billboard hits" (Julien & Levaux 160). Formulaic songs are familiar-- to many, they evoke a sense of nostalgia, particularly paired with the common themes in popular radio music. Though Taylor's song-writing showed promise in her teen years, thematically, the lyrical content has remained stagnant. Sonically, the music has also become more generic and less novel than some of her distinctive country deep cuts. As a grocery store employee, I know how well Swift's discography blends in with the vapid, surface-level pop that permeates our public spaces– all too well.
Maybe We Like Different Things... And That's Okay
Listeners who crave more novelty are naturally inclined to steer clear of Taylor Swift's discography. While familiarity can be comforting, "a surprising chord, for example, may delight us or a different twist in a musical phrase might bring us to tears" (Julien & Levaux 156) So, does it make sense to label Taylor Swift critics "hipsters" or "contrarians" for not loving pop music? Maybe. Is it fair to characterize us as sexist for disliking one female artist's body of work? Not quite. Broadly characterizing Swift's critics as sexist is not only reductive, but it is counter-intuitive behavior from any self-proclaimed "girl's girl."
Comentários