by James Erwin · March 13, 2024
Photo by Andy Witchger, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Some people really have a problem with Taylor Swift. I am not one of those people, but I haven’t been much of a fan since her country era when I was in Middle School and “Teardrops On My Guitar” perfectly encapsulated my feelings about my crush. I didn’t care for the pop turn she took, and time matured my tastes.
Upon hearing Kacey Musgraves’ recent single “Deeper Well,” I realized what was missing: while my tastes had matured, Taylor herself had not. At least, the character she plays in song had not.
It may be that her music simply isn’t for me, but there is something strange about a 34-year-old still inhabiting the perspective of a teenage girl. The charm of a self-pitying young woman who seems eternally naive about the challenges of romance and perpetually upset to have to endure them eventually wears off. Does she expect to keep embarking on new quests of self-discovery like an unemployed post-grad even as she remains optimistic about finding The One well into middle age?
There is nothing especially wrong with this, and I actually enjoy much of Swift’s music. What concerns me is the role she plays in promoting a culture of perpetual adolescence when she is in a position to set a better example. Commercially, the formula seems to work for now – but will it ever change?
Evidently, Taylor Swift can’t change the formula even if she wanted to. Much like Paul Atreides in Dune, she’s imprisoned by her own followers, too bought into the character she plays to change course now. It has become regrettably trendy in certain younger circles to construct one’s personality around partially-understood psychological concepts. Casual self-diagnoses and trivializing misuses of the word “trauma” are omnipresent. Swift could have a positive influence on this unhealthy subculture by counter-programming with themes of self-possession and maturity, but instead she panders to it. “Anti-Hero” plays at mild introspection but ultimately delivers a string of buzzwords you might recognize from therapy or a TikTok #traumadump. If she sang instead about having genuine grace for her exes or making peace with an imperfect world, she would risk a significant portion of her fanbase. Again, there’s nothing wrong with this as a commercial product, but it leaves one wondering if the free-spirited Musgraves sets a better example for my generation.
Because unlike Swift, Kacey Musgraves is willing to risk changing the formula. Her latest single “Deeper Well” is the anti- “Anti-Hero” – the “I guess some of my problems are my own fault, but I’ll co-opt them as my whole identity and refuse to change, teehee” ethos is nowhere to be found. The 35-year-old country singer is but a year older than Ms. Swift yet decades ahead in emotional development. Where “Anti-Hero” begins with the cavalier admission that “I have this thing where I get older but just never wiser,” “Deeper Well” strikes the opposite note:
My Saturn has returned
When I turned twenty-seven
Everything started to change
Took a long time, but I learned
The stinging humility “Anti-Hero” plays at but never achieves is immediately evident. The latter’s breezy melody bordered on self-parody for Swift and gave some of her fans permission to admit unflattering things about themselves within the safe bounds of a popular culture that allows such shortcomings to repurposed as tools of identity construction. Right off the bat, Musgraves disrupts this permission structure: rather than offer affirmation, she challenges her audience by offering herself as an example of what becomes possible when you find a deeper well of purpose for your life.
The real poignancy kicks in at the second verse:
I used to wake and bake
Roll out of bed, hit the gravity bong that I made
And start the day
For a while, it got me by
Everything I did seemed better when I was high
I don’t know why
This is a far cry from the young woman whose breakthrough album encouraged listeners to “roll up a joint (or don’t)” as long as we followed our arrows, wherever they happened to point. She continues:
So I’m getting rid of
The habits that I feel
Are real good at wasting my time
No regrets, baby, I just think that maybe
It’s natural when things lose their shine
So other things can glow
I’ve gotten older now I know
How to take care of my soul
I found a deeper well
In the gentlest way possible and with all due humility, this celebrity stoner tells us, “Get off your ass and stop dulling your senses. Trust me, it’s better once you do.” It rings true for a woman of her age while Swift’s schtick grows less and less believable with each passing year.
Taylor Swift broke through before her sweet sixteen, achieved superstardom fast, and has carefully hewn to something resembling the image of that curly-haired teeny-bopper. Along the way, she came to embody the arrested development of our shared millennial generation. Kacey Musgraves self-produced three whole albums and came in seventh on a second-rate singing competition show before she secured a record deal. As a result, she resembles the grand tradition of country stars Dolly Parton and Reba McIntire: she has crossover appeal, but there is an earthiness, an undeniable reality to her prose that Taylor Swift cannot achieve.
The ultimate mark of maturation can be found in verse three of “Deeper Well,” wherein she recognizes that a boring upbringing in an in-tact family is a blessing after all:
When I was growing up
We had what we needed
Shoes on our feet but the world was as flat as a plate
And that’s OK
The things I was taught
Only got me so far, had to figure the rest out myself
And then I found
I found a deeper well
For her fans’ sake, I hope Taylor finds a deeper well soon.
Tags: Kacey Musgraves
James Erwin
James Erwin is Federal Affairs Manager for Telecommunications at Americans for Tax Reform and the Executive Director of Digital Liberty. He previously worked four years for Senator Susan Collins on the Senate Aging Committee and in her personal office. A native of Yarmouth, Maine, Erwin holds a B.A. from Bates College. He currently resides in Washington, DC, and his work has appeared in The Hill, National Review, and Townhall. Follow James @erwin1854 on the platform formerly known as Twitter.
April 16, 2015
December 22, 2010
April 15, 2018
“If she sang instead about having genuine grace for her exes”
Have you heard Afterglow?
“Why’d I have to break what I love so much?
It’s on your face, and I’m to blame, I need to say
Hey
It’s all me in my head
I’m the one who burned us down”
or Happiness?
“No one teaches you what to do
When a good man hurts you
And you know you hurt him too”
or The Great War?
“You drew up some good faith treaties
I drew curtains closed, drank my poison all alone
You said I have to trust more freely
But diesel is desire, you were playin’ with fire
And maybe it’s the past that’s talkin’
Screamin’ from the crypt
Tellin’ me to punish you for things you never did
So I justified it”
You really need to listen to Swift’s last 4 albums to appreciate how much her music has changed.
That excerpt from “The Great War” is pretty moving to read just as poetry. I enjoyed reading the Musgrave excerpts in the OP too. It turns out to be possible that both Swift and Musgrave are good songwriters who can explore complex, ambiguous emotional territory.
Mmmhmm knew this was written by a man.
The cult of authenticity is one of the weirdest aspects of Anglophone music criticism. From what I can tell only English speakers seem to really care about whether a musician is authentic or grown up or whatever you want to call it. Outside the Anglophone world, there doesn”t seem to be these concerns at all.
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