Are You a Swifty?

@larsman I was making a point with an analogy.
You said “if someone likes something, that means it’s good.”  
I’m saying, “no it doesn’t.”  

It’s really sad that these comparisons are emerging here.
Joni?
Aretha?
Adele?
Madonna?
JLo?
Whitney Houston?

How/why would Taylor Swift be compared to each of them?
Her music and vibe is quite different from each of them…

…hmmmmm….
…why would Taylor Swift be compared to these artists….
…hmmmmmm…

…oh! Right! Of course! How silly of me!

We’re super sexist and dirt-brained! Of course!
Swift is a woman…and so are those other artists! Of course!
That’s why it makes sense to compare Swift to Aretha, Swift to Madonna and Swift to Beyoncé!
Of course!

Ugh…gross.

”SiNgEr…wOmAn…I…LiKe…wOmAn…SiNgEr…”.
Now, Ogg, you’re getting too excited, drag your knuckles back to your cave and take a nap. And watch out for the tar pit.

We apparently only see the “woman” part. So whenever an artist comes along, we go into lizard-brain-mode and only compare her artistry to other artists of the same chromosomal makeup, regardless of how dubious the musical comparison is.

Sad.

@dayglow My point is that instead of addressing the question, “you like Taylor Swift?”, instead of talking about the relative merits of her art, instead of talking about songwriting, performing, etc., we’re showing all of the insight and analytical acumen required to say, “sHe a LaDy. LaDy SiNg. I kNoW LaDy SiNg. I KnOw aReThA. I kNoW mAdOnNa. I KnOw aDeLe…ShE nOt LiKe tHaT oNe…sHe sOrT oF LiKe tHaT OnE…LaDy SiNg…”

Further, to address your question (‘Should she be compared to Ritchie Blackmore or Ian Gillan?’ )…um…no. No she shouldn’t. That would be an inexplicable choice of comparison as far as Taylor Swift goes.
More importantly…why does she have to be compared to any of them?
Why is this choice, a choice to so quickly compare her to these other people (of course, those comparisons being symptomatic of this website, a bizarre and sexist need to describe such a thing as a ‘female artist,’ as though it is a ‘musical genre’ or something 🤣🤣) so rampant in this thread?
As far as I can tell, the question of this thread is not, “Who can we compare Taylor Swift to as a musical artist?” but, “You guys like Taylor Swift?”

I find digitally pitch-corrected vocals with no sonic depth, dimension or sense of any interaction with a physical space, with a good chunk of their humanity removed, to be nowhere near “pleasant” and much worse than, “non-descript.”  
“Pain-inducing.”
“Punishing.”  
Those are my words for it. 
 

Or, instead of subtle sexism, we could just have really full-on, super-gross, troglodyte blather.  
That’s also an option.

@wesheadley You say, “She is clearly a talented songwriter…but what she mostly writes about…isn’t very interesting to me.”  
So…she’s simultaneously “not very interesting,” and “clearly a talented songwriter.”  
Now THAT is interesting.

@wesheadley Again, this is very interesting stuff.  
You’re describing current popular music as, “boring,” “lazy writing,” “absent of melody,”  “dull,” “narcissistic,” “lazy,” and “sounding like it came more out of a corporate boardroom than an artist’s imagination” while also saying you “you have to try new popular music all the time,” and that you’ll “never give up” on the stuff. 
 

Why?

If modern popular music is all of these very negative things, then why would you “have to” “keep trying?”  
“Have to”?  
Why?  
Where is the net gain in subjecting yourself to some cumulative 10-20 hours/year or whatever undertaking self-punishment for such little gain?
There’s waaaaaay too much good music as it is from, say, the early 18th century (as just one example of one period of music) to deeply engage with in a single lifetime, let alone the 19th century, the early 20th century, the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘90s, etc., etc., etc….

If I consider an experience to not only be so dreadfully inefficient but also so incredibly punishing (personally, not I’m merely non-plussed by 21 Savage, Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Bad Bunny, Justin Bieber, Morgan Wallen, I feel almost violently assaulted by the awfulness of that music), then I would not undertake such a task.  It would yield a very disadvantageous cost-benefit ratio.  

@wesheadley Perhaps what you’re saying is, “there is great potential for personal growth in exposing oneself to stuff they typically assume to be crap, as one may surprise oneself and avoid a certain stagnation of musical awareness,” or, as Werner Herzog likes to say, “the poet must not close his eyes.”  
These things I can appreciate.

@wesheadley I’m with you 100% on the repulsion from algorithmic dominance in the dissemination of music today.  
I hate to beat a dead horse, but I really chafe at the “female artist” bit.  
No one ever says, “you should check out (insert male artist). When I’m in the mood for male artist music, he really hits the spot.”  
If someone said that to you, you would furrow your brow and say, “what? ‘Male artist?’ What the hell are you talking about?”  
Yet, for some reason, even in 2024, we constantly hear this bit of, “if you like female artists, you should check out (insert female artist),” or, as is rampantly the case in this very thread, instead of discussing Taylor Swift and her music, an inexplicable choice of saying stuff like, “nah, listen to (Joni, Aretha, Whitney, Adele, Beyoncé, blah, blah, blah…) instead,” as if it’s automatically assumed that because two different artists are female, they are automatically alike.  
If someone said to you, “don’t listen to Justin Bieber, listen to Cecil Taylor,” that would be a very strange comment; where the hell does Cecil Taylor fit into a Justin Bieber conversation?  Well, they’re two male artists, so, that’s why.  
WTF?!?!

I’m sorry, but it’s very, very dumb.

@erik_squires I think you’re confusing Taylor Swift with Britney Spears.  
Britney Spears was tied to a conservatorship that she got out of recently, not Taylor Swift.

@wesheadley You say, “…the fake divide between male and female artists…” yet you also say, “For female pop artists I’d put Lana Del Rey...”  

Further, if we actually entertained such dumb sexism in this way (comparing ‘female artists’), and then took your assertion that Lana Del Rey’s oeuvre could be placed “among the best,” “in any era,” we’d still be walkin’ on reeeeaaaal thin ice.  

If we looked at the songwriting output in the era of mid-‘60s-through-mid-‘70s by the likes of Carole King, Ellie Greenwich, Cynthia Weil, Nina Simone, Dolly Parton, Valerie Simpson, Aretha Franklin, Loretta Lynn, Nico, Bobbie Gentry, Joni Mitchell, and Betty Davis, and then looked at Lana Del Rey’s oeuvre, and then said hers could be “put up there with any of them,”…um…uh…yyyyeeaahh, no.  

If we threw her oeuvre into the mix of ‘90s artists like The Breeders, Aimee Mann, Björk, Lauryn Hill, Sinead O’Connor, Liz Phair, Iris Dement, Sleater-Kinney, Gillian Welch, PJ Harvey, Lucinda Williams, and Fiona Apple…um…uh…yyyeeeaaahh, no.

Throw Lana (or Taylor for that matter) into a room with either of those eras’ artists in their primes (we could do it with other eras…mid-‘70s-through-mid-‘80s, for example…same result) and she’d likely pull a Wayne’s World-esque, bowing-on-her-knees-on-the-floor, “We are not worthy! We are not worthy!” (in this case, the ‘we’ being her two-dozen-odd different co-writers the last decade)

@wesheadley Unlike her previous LP, Lust For Life, which had no less than 17 different writing credits on it, Norman Fucking Rockwell! was another Jack Antonoff job.
I don’t dislike Lana Del Rey. Not my fave, but she’s alright.
Jack Antonoff…that’s another story.
His role, as I see it, is to take artists with talent and find a way to bland them up for mass consumption.
He must have good social skills or something. He’s curried the favor of many a top-selling artist (including Swift) and receives good words from each. I find the music he has worked on in a producer/co-writer capacity as well as his own stuff (whatever outfit that may be, Bleachers, solo, whatever) to largely be bland and lame. It seems he’s found a way to be considered some kind of svengali who somehow retains at least a modicum of street cred while making lame music that people with no taste think is good.
One of my favorite current artists, Annie Clark (St. Vincent) had made 4 knockout LPs (I consider two of them, Actor and St. Vincent, to be classics) before ’17’s Masseduction. I thought that one was a letdown. Whatever. A great artist is entitled to have a so-so one after four straight killers. The next one, ‘21’s Daddy’s Home, was another disappointment. This time, I did some research. Found the common denominator: Jack Antonoff. I then did some research on this Jack Antonoff character. Came to the conclusion he sucks.
I don’t have much skin in the game with the other artists he’s produced.
I was just listening to early ‘10s Lana and was reminded that it’s pretty good. It’s not like I’m gonna be pissed if her music starts to be lame. I don’t like it enough to be bothered. St. Vincent was different; once I realized he, based on his track record, may have largely been the reason St. Vincent’s music became more bland and lame, I was indeed pissed.
I really hope her next LP is Antonoff-free and returns to pre-Antonoff quality.

@wesheadley 
Yup.  
I remember roughly a decade ago seeing pics of Jack Antonoff with Lena Dunham.  
Not knowing he was involved with that wretched song “We Are Young” by fun. (ugh…that ‘lower-case letters’ thing…compounded, in this case, by the juvenile, cutesy/quirky addition of the period (.) at the end…ugh…) I just saw him as Lena Dunham’s boyfriend. I’m not proud of this, but my visceral experience upon seeing those pics was, “ew, that’s a punchable face.”  But, in my ignorance, I just thought he was Lena Dunham’s boyfriend (as opposed to a big pop star) and didn’t think much of it and promptly forgot about him.
Fast-forward roughly a decade later, as I mentioned, I realized he was the common denominator in one of my fave current artists’ last two bland/lame/disappointing LPs. After researching this Jack Antonoff character, I realized a lot of things that caused me to conclude he sucks.  
After this conclusion, I felt a little less guilty about having the instant reaction upon seeing pictures of him of, “ew…that’s a punchable face.”

@loomisjohnson The “she’s a role model” thing you said so many of her fans said when asked what was so appealing about Taylor Swift…I find that unfortunate.  
This notion of a celebrity being a “role model.”  That dog won’t hunt.  
Just another person, like the rest of us. Flawed like the rest of us.  
MLK? Jesus? Okay, if someone chose people like that as role models, I could dig it.  
A celebrity? That is kind of sad. For this idea to still be so rampant is indicative of a sick society. We seem to expect celebrities (from whatever occupation) to be “role models” more than we expect actual good-deed-doers to be role models.  
Remember that ‘90s commercial with Charles Barkley where he said, “I am not a role model. Parents should be role models. Just because I can dunk a basketball doesn’t mean I should raise your kids.” Yup, that pretty much sums it up.  
The idea that a cliche-spewing, milquetoast, 1950s idea of what a “good role model is, a ‘non-controversial’ (controversy?!?! Oh no!! Using your brain for five seconds?!!? Oh no!! Saying things that challenge inane conformity?!?! Oh no!!! We can’t have our kids learning about such things!!) person?  
Wow. That is really sad and does not bode well for our future if we are so fearful of something “different” and so crave mindless conformity.  
Scary.

It’s hilarious when someone views an online forum thread as being so “beneath” them, and then goes out of their way to participate in it. 

I wonder how different her PR/media hype is from Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Elvis, Beatles, Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Michael Jackson, & Bruce Springsteen…

@larsman  What if “the new thing the kiddies are all gaga about” is, at one time, the Beatles, and at another time, it’s Taylor Swift?  
What if, at one time, it’s Bob Dylan, and another, it’s 21 Savage?  
Chuck Berry, or Bad Bunny?
Surely we’d agree that the first thing is much better than the second?  
Just because people get older and things marketed to young folks seem juvenile and frivolous doesn’t mean they are just as good as those things from the past.   
 

Sad that a thread regarding the most insipid, milquetoast, uncontroversial, apolitical celebrity somehow inspires troglodyte political blather.

@immatthewj

Nope. Swing and a miss.

I’ve said quite a bit about a whole heckuva lot of things on the three pages of this thread.
I commented on,
- Taylor Swift’s music and her cynical exploitation of the American’s need for vapid pablum
- sexism
- pop history
- Jack Antonoff
- digitally-pitch-corrected vocals
- whether there is any merit to exposing oneself to a significant swath of Top 40 music in 2024
- the ways people ascribe “role modeling” to celebrities
- the ways older people slag contemporary popular music
- the ways people go out of their way to contribute to a subject of an online forum thread even though they write how stupid, bad and frivolous the whole thread is
- the ways people somehow find a way to turn a thread about a bland apolitical pop artist into a vomit-fest of irrelevant political crap

I “added my $0.02” on a whole heckuva lotta things on this thread, all of them relevant to the thread.

What you chose to do was different.

What you chose to do was come on this thread and do nothing but feed the trolls, and feed them by referencing our former President and Candace Owens, two things that couldn’t possibly be more irrelevant to the topic of Taylor Swift’s music.

When I criticized the decline of the thread going from being about Swift’s music into a bunch of dumb, childish, completely irrelevant, junior-high-cafeteria-level blather, you got butthurt and chose to attempt to attribute hypocrisy to me, a wild and sad attempt, one that failed badly, only further embarrassing yourself.

Swing and a miss.

@immatthewj  Read my multiple posts here on this thread, and then read yours.  
See if you can figure out which of the two things is “conversation,” and which is “trolling.”  
You said I was “trolling.”  
Ha!  
It takes one to know one.
Have you ever heard the psychologist term, “projection”?  
Look into it.

@simao My description of Taylor Swift’s music (have you ever heard Taylor Swift’s music, by the way?) as constituting a “cynical exploitation of the American’s need for vapid pablum” is not at all “on par with those in this community who feel that rap is not music.”
Not in any way whatsoever. How one could make such a leap in logic, how one could draw such a comparison, is beyond me.

“Cultural gatekeeping.” Talk about yet another meaningless, vague, buzzword-infested word salad of a trendy term.
“The O’Reily Factor” with Bill O’Reily was the #1-rated cable “news” (quotation marks around ‘news’ is a must in this case) show for some 15-odd years.
In 2022, “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” was Hulu’s most-watched series premiere in the U.S.
In 2016, an objectively, indisputably vile person was ELECTED PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.
McDonald’s “OVER 20 BILLION BURGERS SOLD” (or whatever number the sign says).
We could go on and on.
Do YOU think those are all good things? After all, someone who never engages in “cultural gatekeeping” would never commit the egregious sin of pointing out that something is utter garbage. I mean, look at how many people buy the stuff!
Americans buy utter garbage, and they literally fall over each other in droves (note the typical opening feeding frenzy after the ranch hands ring the feeding bell at 6:00 am at a big box-store on Black Friday) trying to buy it.
This is very old news.
And no, it is neither snobbery nor “cultural gatekeeping” (whatever the hell that means) to point this out, and to call the things cited above things like “trash,” “garbage,” “objectively bad,” “drivel,” “pablum,” etc.

Just because 20 trillion burgers sold doesn’t mean it ain’t bad for ya.

@waltersalas  That’s cool.  
I just disagree with you on ol’ Taylor.
Maybe at some point I’ll feel differently.  
Maybe not.

@simao I said the music was vapid. If you want to take that personally and take it as though I'm saying YOU are vapid, I have no control over that, that's on you.

I watch "Farting Preacher" videos on YouTube very often.  
Is that "shallow" enough for you?

It seems odd to me that you would describe as "boring" the hypothetical person who eschews superficial and shallow things (presumably in favor of exciting/interesting/smart things). I find stupid, trite, cliche-mongering things to be, at best, boring. At worst, a punishing experience.  

Different strokes, I guess.

@larsman 

"Personally, I think if somebody likes it, it's good, even if it's just good for that one person. Can't negate somebody else's experience..."

I appreciate what you're getting at, but do you really, I mean...really believe that?

Cyber-speak can often impart unintended tone and fail to represent tone accurately, so I'm going to emphasize that the above question is sincere, not laced with contempt, sarcasm, condescension or anything like that.  

I'll further clarify the question: lots of people think unspeakable violent acts of cruelty are "good." These people end up in prison.  If they think those things are "good," does it actually make them "good?"

@simao Allow me to once again issue semantic gymnastics and snobbishly parse out words:
“…enforcing a completely arbitrary and arrogant gateway for what can be considered legitimate art…”
Come again?  
“gateway?” “enforcing” said gateway? 
What is this crap?  
Ay yi yi…
Who said anything about “legitimate art?” Not me.  That was you.  

I said I think the vast majority of the most popular music today is utter trash (that includes Swift, though I wouldn’t put her in the upper tier of the most egregious offenders). It appears my opinion has struck a nerve, as though you’ve somehow taken this as some personal affront.  
It’s just a personal opinion. You’re free to disagree.  

I wish I could be so flattered to think I had the power to be a “cultural gate-keeper” and “enforce a gateway” to the whole of the music-listening population, but I don’t.  
You’re giving me waaaaaaaaay too much power, bud.  
Again, it’s just 1 out of 8,000,000,000 opinions.  
I’m not sitting here as though I’m some God-like bouncer at some Studio 54-esque gate, checking everyone’s music collection and saying, “nope, sorry, you can’t come in…too lame…you can’t enter the world of music fandom.”  
Just. A. Guy.

You referenced this sentence of mine, “ - Whether there is any merit to exposing oneself to a significant swath of Top 40 music in 2024.”  
Not sure if you just totally missed the point or if you were taking my words out of context or some combination of both. 
That was something I wrote in a previous post here, a bullet-point-thing merely illustrating the various topics I’d addressed here (there was a knucklehead who chose to join the forum and just start firing away Yosemite Sam-style with the political trolling, and he foolishly tried to insinuate my contributions to the thread were of the same nature, so I just listed the various topics I’d addressed, all of which were relevant to this thread on Taylor Swift, none of the topics remotely close political candidates or Bible sales)
It was a question, not a statement either way.   
I’m not really sure what your last sentence is getting at
 

@simao No, talk of "legitimate art" is not the conclusion one who actually read my words and understands words would reach.  

Best of luck with that whole "words" thing and that whole "intellectual honesty" thing.  

You're off to a good start with, "unctuous." That's a goodin'!

@simao I said, “that dog won’t hunt,” not, “that dog don’t bite.”  
I look forward to the edification and growth I may be so blessed to attain in a future meeting with the sage-like simao.
 

@larsman For one, I didn’t say anything about “political violence” either.  
Again, I was merely using an analogy to challenge the notion, “if someone likes it, it’s good.”

Having a personal opinion may not necessarily be “not having an open mind.” 
If a person makes grand sweeping statements about stuff they haven’t exposed themselves to, well, yeah…that’s certainly not having an open mind.  
If a person takes the time to expose themselves to something and says, “I don’t like it,” that’s just having a personal opinion.  
If someone handed you a plate of the best preparation of a particular food that was ever prepared for that food, and you ate it and said, “I don’t like it,” is that “not having an open mind”?   
The person that eats it and says, “this is the best thing I’ve ever eaten” may not necessarily have “a more open mind,” but merely a different experience.

@deadhead1000 You’re right.  
Openmindedness certainly entails not shutting off completely an entire thing based on only a small sample size.  
People’s tastes change and one may be surprised trying something again how much they like it.  
In other words, don’t be a Green Eggs & Ham kinda guy.

@botrytis Do you think 50 years from now people will regard Taylor Swift’s music the same way we regard Chuck Berry, Little Richard, James Brown, the Beatles and Bob Dylan today?   
1) Going from Rosemary Clooney/Doris Day/Frankie Laine/Patti Page,
to Elvis/Little Richard/Buddy Holly/Chuck Berry—>’60s/‘70s,
and,  
2) Going from Kanye West/Lady Gaga/Bruno Mars/Katy Perry,
to Taylor Swift/BTS/Bad Bunny/Morgan Wallen.

Those two things are not alike.  
1) is a radical shift in what popular music sounded like.  
2) is more or less just a continuation of the same
 

@botrytis How is that a disingenuous question?
Is is not disingenuous to suggest that saying, “Taylor Swift is mediocre” is the same as saying, “(parent referring to a popular artist in 60s/‘70s) it will ‘rot your brain?’”

@simao He got in on that one too, eh?
Good for him.

“Her latest album is a blatant rip off of Lana Del Rey’s sound and style. So much so that it’s downright pathetic.”
What exactly is Lana Del Rey’s “sound” and “style” and how may one “blatantly rip-off” such?
Lana’s songs, whether one prefers one over the other, will always be more harmonically, structurally and melodically sophisticated than Taylor’s, and dare I say her lyrics present greater sophistication as well.
Nevertheless, there is nothing so distinct in Lana’s music to constitute a “unique sound” that may be “ripped off” by anyone.
Languid vocal delivery, pop song construction of well-trodden means, and a few string arrangements mixed in with electronic percussion…Lana has no unique claim to such.

There are tons of great artists that lack technical proficiency, either vocally or instrumentally.  
Technical proficiency in this way is by no means a pre-requisite to being a great artist.  
Conversely, tons of super-technically-proficient performers may bore a listener to tears.

@immatthewj Bob Dylan wasn’t, isn’t, nor ever will be a technically proficient vocalist.  
I feel like that should go without saying.

”Do you think Bob Dylan can’t sing?”
“If someone cannot paint, can his or her paintings really be art?”

If something moves you, it moves you.  
That’s it.  
It’s art.

Being a great renderer does not necessarily make an artist “better” than Jackson Pollack.  
Being a vocalist of 99.9 percentile control / pitch accuracy / pitch range does not necessarily make them a “better” vocalist than Bob Dylan.

This “crusty old audiophile” line is tiresome.  
“When an Audiogon forum poster expresses a lack of Taylor Swift fandom, they are just a crusty old audiophile harboring an unfair bias against new music.”
This is a very cheap, easy, fallacious dismissal.  
Dismissing an opinion ad hominem on the premise that the progenitor is just “crusty and old” is just as bad as someone dismissing Taylor Swift on the grounds of “new=bad.”
If we want to debate the actual argument and do so on the terms of logic, fact and fairness, we can do that. That is an actual substantive debate.  
Making fallacious arguments is not.

The thread is called, “Are You a Swifty?”  
The people posting here are addressing the question.  
Some say, “yea” some say “nay,” some say, “meh,” etc. etc.  

No transgression occurs, no evidence of some sort of personal flaw is shown when a comment is “nay,” or “meh.”  
That’s just a person (at least, I assume it’s a person and not a bot) contributing to a purely subjective topic.

@mahgister I hear what you’re saying but it is virtually impossible to “prove” one work of art is “better” than another.  
I could sit here and drone on and on why a particular piece of music is “good,” with all the academic, musicological, music-theory-vernacular-laden talk regarding a given piece of music, but it’s ultimately still completely subjective.  
I don’t like Taylor Swift, but I will never “prove” that (blank) is “better” because it’s purely subjective.  
I may be able to make a well-formed argument fortified by extensive education but the Taylor Swift fan will say, “oh. Okay…yeah, I still like Taylor Swift more” and they won’t be any more “right” or “wrong” than me.  
Art is not mathematics or science.  
Math may certainly come into play in many forms of music: composition, performance, recording, and maximizing the fidelity of playback, but it is art, not math.