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Does anyone else find the thud of Taylor Swift’s inexorable march to sequinned leotard world domination slightly ghoulish, intimidating and, dare I say it, depressing?
As her Eras Tour gathers ever-increasing gravity-defying momentum, I find myself wondering what on earth the ubiquity and homogeneity of her music says about the state of popular music today.
Growing up, we had Madonna, who combined electrifying performances with a truly trailblazing agenda of barrier-breaking subject-matter. She embraced gay pride, sex, challenged the Catholic church, supported the Aids movement, and completely and utterly reinvented the way society perceived women. Her music was interesting, experimental and varied.
Admittedly the intellectually challenged of my generation also embraced Take That and the Spice Girls, but the rest of us also had The Prodigy, Elastica, The Cure, Blur, Pulp, The Smiths, The Stone Roses, Nirvana. Crucially, we had so many options of what we could like and dislike and so much of it was alternative. Not only was the music thought-provoking and imaginative, but the lyrics were meaningful and caught the spirit of a generation.
By comparison Swift’s music sounds to me like what I would listen to if I had the intellect of a very small worm. Not only is it uninteresting, repetitive and entirely basic, her lyrics are brain-numbingly banal. Take the following: “You smoked, then ate seven bars of chocolate/We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist/I scratch your head, you fall asleep/Like a tattooed golden retriever.” Or “My muses, acquired like bruises”, or “even statues crumble, if they’re made to wait”.
It’s all absolute nonsense.
It doesn’t seem to matter. Swift’s Eras Tour is the highest-grossing concert of all time, she’s the most-streamed artist on Spotify, the highest-grossing female touring act and the first billionaire with music as her main source of income.
Swift has a business and marketing operation behind her akin to a like-generating, algorithm-outwitting juggernaut
More a brand than an artist, she never says anything unexpected or controversial, she’s more a capitalist construct with a business and marketing operation behind her akin to a like-generating, algorithm-outwitting juggernaut.
I’m genuinely concerned that Swift’s dominance says something frightening about the hegemony of social media which means that rather than myriad opinions we seem to have less and less diversity of thought and Donald Trump and Taylor Swift seem to be the only winners in our strange online lives.
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I physically flinch when adults tell me they love Swift. I see her as the canary in the coalmine, a talisman of our dystopian times where devices have stolen our imagination and ability for critical thought.
What does she stand for, what does she stand against? Aside from championing sequin leotards, it’s hard to tell. I also resent the fact that anyone who criticises her or questions the quality of the music is immediately savaged by her pitchfork-wielding fans and called anti-feminist.
So how does that work then when the only memorable element in her lyrical oeuvre seems to be an obsession with her failed relationships with men. Am I the only person who finds that incredibly reductive? Can you imagine a man constantly defining themselves by who they used to date? It’s laughable, and highly regressive.
I’m not expecting her to sing about transcendentalism but it would be good to see a bit more brainpower at play.
Anna van Praagh is the Evening Standard’s chief content officer
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