Bildungsroman with Taylor Swift

Here a a few choice moments from a long, rambling essay by Reise at Autostraddle.com from February 6, 2010.

Why Taylor Swift Offends Little Monsters, Feminists, and Weirdos
There was not anything to hate about Taylor Swift’s twangy addictive pop/country music until she snagged Album of the Year. Thus, transitioning her from “harmlessly popular teenage pop fad” into a Legendary context associated with prior winners like John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Lauryn Hill, and Outkast.

I felt guilty for having such antagonistic feelings about Taylor Swift the Image when Taylor Swift the Person is, obviously, a good human being. I knew I had to do my Taylor Swift due diligence. I listened to her music, read her blog, and watched her videos. And I finally figured it out.

Taylor Swift is a feminist’s nightmare.

Taylor Swift’s Favorite Storyline:

The rush to exalt Swift is (I believe) a desperate attempt to infuse our allegedly apocalypse-bound country with a palatable conservative ideology in the form of a complacent, repressed feminine ideal. It’s working ’cause Swift writes good songs and America is terrified that its children have been scarred by Britney Spears’s psychotic vagina and Miley Cyrus’s obnoxious adolescence.

“The Grammy voters chose someone who, according to her lyrics, has spent her entire life waiting for phone calls and dreaming about horses and sunsets.”
Rather than choosing an established/evolved talent (Beyoncé) or a revolutionary (Lady Gaga), the Grammys chose someone who, according to her lyrics, has spent her entire life waiting for phone calls and dreaming about horses and sunsets.

Listen up; if I ever get my life together enough to reproduce other life forms, they will not be joining Taylor Nation – they will be brave, creative, inventive, envelope-pushing little monsters who will find a pretty, skinny white blonde girl in a white peasant shirt strolling through nature-themed screensaver-esque fantasylands singing about how “when you’re fifteen and somebody tells you they love you, you’re gonna believe them” not only sappy, but also insulting to their inevitable brilliance.

I don’t want my unborn grandchildren to listen to the story of how Taylor Swift won a Grammy she hadn’t earned. I want them to set pianos on fire.

Let’s address the age issue; as SwiftNation is often celebrated as some kind of child prodigy. Twenty isn’t young and her talent, while exceptional, is not unheard of. Grammys have gone to Adele (21), Christina Aguilera (20 in ‘00), LeAnn Rimes (16 in ‘97), Mariah Carey (21 in ‘90) and Alicia Keys (20 in ‘02), among others. Until there’s evidence Swift can sing live, she’s not uniquely qualified as a musician.

Why does Swift seem, at 20, a decade younger than Lady Gaga? ‘Cause Swift’s package is “Purity Sue Ingenue”:  eternally childlike, obedient and one-dimensional. Mothers love this package, and teenage girls are hypnotized by her simple songs & pretty hair & propensity for crying on her instruments.

When Beyoncè was Swift’s age, she was onstage with Destiny’s Child, proclaiming: “The house I live in / I’ve bought it / The car I’m driving / I’ve bought it / All the women who are independent / Throw your hands up at me!”

It goes without saying — because, of course, no one wants to say it — that Swift was able to succeed so early ’cause her family was both supportive & wealthy enough to enable her ambitions. Swift had dreams, she chased ‘em, and she got ‘em; all before puberty! That’s not a Cinderella story, that’s more or less the most awesome childhood of all time.

Never was this bunny-rabbit/child persona more exploited than it was after the Video Music Awards. If Kanye had snatched that mike from Lady Gaga, she would’ve snatched it right back, called Kanye an asshole (he is), admitted he was right (he was), and the whole thing would’ve been done.

Taylor had another chance at the VMA’s end to prove her maturity by thanking and honoring Beyoncé for calling her back up to speak. But no, she was just like, “A’ight my turn!”

Swift’s songwriting is as thematically ambitious as a 15-year-old’s LiveJournal, which is to say, like a 15-year-old’s LiveJournal. It never strives for thematic weight or challenges ideas not already covered by Sweet Valley High or The Children’s Illustrated Bible.

If Swift’s work connects with teenage girls, it does so on the most simplistic, reductive territory of all: pining for boys, walking in the rain, kissing in the rain, crying drops of tears on her guitar, driving in trucks with cool boys, wanting boys she can’t have, more rain, more letter-writing, more stalking, more broken hearts, breathing problems as a side-effect of broken hearts, fairytale princess this, white horse that, more pining at the window, more psuedo-stalking, more incomplete hearts yearning for your touch, and one song that misinterprets Shakespeare and The Scarlet Letter so criminally I’m certain she’s never read either.

Swift simply hasn’t had the life experience and doesn’t inherently possess the emotional maturity to create great art. Which is fine — most young pop stars don’t, which is why they don’t win Grammys.

Not only are her songwriting choices almost mind-numbingly safe, but she also covers territory so familiar, it’s almost a carbon-copy of someone else’s song!
In 2006’s “Girl Next Door,” by Saving Jane, the protagonist yearns:
She is the prom queen /I’m in the marching band
/ She is a cheerleader I’m sitting in the stands.
This sounds familiar, right? Well, here’s Taylor’s version:
But she wears short skirts/ I wear t-shirts
/She’s cheer captain/ and I’m on the bleachers
Interesting.

With almost frame-by-frame precision, Taylor Swift’s most popular music video is not only exactly like dozens of 80s and 90s teen flicks (which are basically remakes of 19th century romantic fiction & Shakespearean allegories), but it’s also exactly like the music video for “Girl Next Door.”

Swift’s insistence on casting herself as the outcast or the proverbial “girl in the bleachers” while prettier girls date her crush objects is really silly. Her standard-issue prettiness conforms to a hegemonic Caucasian beauty standard and she’s selling her fans short to claim otherwise; they’ll likely find that the doors that opened for Swift will never open for them, even if they relate to her lyrics.

Even when Swift’s songs cast her as the outcast, the freakiest she can get is putting on a pair of glasses and a t-shirt which has apparently been signed by all of her non-existent friends.
Taylor, look at Lady Gaga in that bathtub and tell me that you’re the one in the bleachers:

Here’s the rub: actual freaks make really awesome music. It’s edgy and complicated and it comes from a yearning, desperate, mixed-up place where pain & happiness have existed in equal parts for almost entire lifetimes. It’s not safe or sexless — it’s ugly, hopeful danger.

“Taylor wants to help adolescent girls everywhere feel better about themselves”
-Rolling Stone, The Very Pink, Very Perfect Life of Taylor Swift

Furthermore, Swift’s lyrical message to teenage girls is clear: BOYS. That’s it. Just boys. Crying over boys and feeling broken and/or completed by boys. In fact, Swift loves boys at the exclusion of just about everything else, including other girls. Other girls are obstacles; undeserving enemies who steal Taylor’s soulmates with their bewitching good looks and sexual availability. Unfortunately for these mute yet effortlessly hunky jungle-eyed boys, by choosing the “beautiful” girls over Taylor (who is, suspiciously… also beautiful…), they’re missing out on Taylor’s unique understanding of their heart/inner fireball/angelic rainshower/sweet glory of Jesus. “All those other girls are beautiful,” Taylor pines, “But would they write a song for you?”

This is perhaps her music’s most grating sin: the sex-shaming girl-bashing passed off as outsider insecurity. Boys are angels lit from within with cool hair, fast cars, and eyes that often resemble light sources (stars, sunbeams, etc). These boys never grow beyond metaphor into humanity. If they did, we might have to confront the very idea that Taylor Swift’s entire career is designed to destroy: that teenagers want to have sex. And that wanting is confusing.

Certainly, she’s among a handful of teenage pop stars who truly practices what she preaches. Taylor’s behavior & imagery is just as wholesome as the apple pie her fans dream of baking for their own Jonas Brother-esque boyfriend.  She doesn’t peddle paradoxical mixed messages about sex like the previous generation of teenaged pop stars.
I mean, she’s pretty clear in “Fifteen” — really the only song where Taylor has an actual female friend — that “Abigail gave everything she had to a boy, who changed his mind, and we both cried.”

I’ll spare you the time of listening to the song and give it to you straight: Abigail had sex with a boy, and later they broke up. That’s right. No marriage. She gave him all she had.
That’s right. All Abigail had was her hymen.

Songs like “Fifteen” dig up the ancient Puritan ideal that girls can only access power by confidently and heterosexually denying access to their pants. But there’s power in owning desire too, and even more power in owning that responsibly (especially when you’re young). At her age, my friends and I were having safe sex, listening to Ani DiFranco & Destiny’s Child & Lauryn Hill & The Magnetic Fields & George Michael and um *cough* Britney Spears and so far it seems none of us lost “all we had.”

I’m not saying all teenagers should have sex, or that being sexually active is better for kids than abstinence. I’m just saying the wanting is real. Acting on the wanting is a whole different story — but Taylor is promoting denial of both, whereas I suggest if there is any denial at all, it should be in your actions, not in your desires.

And I think that mature female-empowered desire has never been so present in pop music as it is right now, and many of those women were there on Sunday [at the Grammy's.]

Awards shows this year featured gifted, evolving performers like Pink, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Rihanna and Janet Jackson; women who are more than hymens or fairy tales. Women for whom sex isn’t something you just throw into the crowd like candy — it’s something strong and eternal and tenacious and really quite inspiring.