Is Taylor Swift being taken too seriously?
Pop stars tasked to deliver adolescent angst have rarely been so subdued as Taylor Swift. She is 22 and last month sold 1.2 million copies of her new album in its first seven days of release, an occurrence as rare in the faltering music business as a comet in the night sky.
That Swift defies the current economic model of selling music is not a surprise since she is a star made for this post-recession era of staycations, “Downton Abbey” and Prius sports wagons. Like any pop singer, she mirrors her time, and lucky for her, she didn’t emerge during the economic prosperity of the post-9/11 era when McMansions lined Heartland cornfields, weapons of terror were to be found in the desert and Arnold Schwarzenegger stumped for Hummer. As is known to any market research analyst, we aren’t rewinding to those halcyon days and our current “new normal” means downsized sales expectations in almost every market sector, especially cars, real estate, tourism. Which means the raised metric for pop longevity is demure thoughtfulness, not tacky opulence.
The indulgence of last decade produced enough pop trash to fill a trailer park in East Peoria: Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Ashley Simpson, Jessica Simpson, Mandy Moore, Kelly Osbourne, Avril Lavigne, Hilary Duff and even back benchers t.A.T.u, M2M, Hoku, Skye Sweetnam, Brooke Allison, Willa Ford and many others. The hubris was so high, record contracts were even slung to professional partygoers Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, who were both paid more for their brand than they were for whatever babble they purred into a microphone.
Today, most of these former lip-syncing product pushers are hovering on either side of age 30 and already long past their expiration date, leaving reality television and game shows the only shelves that will hold the weight of their baggage. Time is always a cruel leveler, but what is more telling from the last decade is the overnight rejection of so many of its key touchstones, from Britney Spears to George W. Bush, the tramp stamp to the luxury SUV, rap-rock to screamo, the Osbournes to the Palins.
“Red” (Big Machine), Swift’s fourth album released three weeks ago, is a beneficiary of our lowered expectations from the Bush years. Swift is certainly a more dedicated songwriter and skilled singer than her counterparts from a few years back, but the emotional twists inside her new songs still feel strategized rather than mined from a deeper place. The critical reverence shown to her since the album’s release has positioned her music within the grand tradition of confessional women songwriters — Lucinda Williams, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — but comparisons like those might be too convenient. The early work of that crew revealed poetic flashes of anger, sadness and ᴅᴇᴀᴅly wit, and always with the sense these singers carried a worldly weight on their backs and were using their music to lighten their load. Swift is many times removed from that approach — blame it on getting your first record contract when you’re 16, for starters. Despite how well crafted or brightly produced, these songs are brimming with atтιтude, but it serves to create distance. We never connect to the real person in the song doing the emoting, which is the goal of any music made for adults by adults. Since the ultimate goal of “Red” is to get adults to buy it for themselves, and not their kids, that’s a problem.
