Here’s the kind of guy I am: my musical taste is small-c catholic and runs about 30,000 albums. (All CD and digital, no vinyl. I’m not a hipster prone to dropping thirty-five bucks on a picture disc of Ghost in the Machine or a “junkyard swirl”-colored 2-LP edition of Out of State Plates.) If you make good music, no matter the genre, I’m probably going to like it.
On any given day I might alternate listening to some Webb Pierce records with the Annie Get Your Gun original cast recording, and then follow those up with some Pantera, and then some Dandy Livingstone, and then some Bananarama, and then some Albert King, etc. etc. Put it this way: I have a regrettable hybrid Grateful Dead/Pennywise (the punk band, not the clown) tattoo I got on my upper arm when I was nineteen.
I also absolutely love Taylor Swift, which makes me, I guess, kind of rare as a melomaniac, and also kind of weird, to some people, considering I’m a forty-year-old man.
When I ask some friends of mine whether they like Taylor Swift, I’m met with a furrowed brow and a look of mixed disgust and hostility as if I just asked them if they enjoy imagining their parents having vigorous, uninhibited sex in front of a room full of tumescent churchmen. Many people who aren’t fans, certainly among my friend group, consider her “basic white bitch” (BWB) music. To a degree, the BWB is her target demographic, and her female fans aren’t helping prove the haters wrong when they do ridiculous nonsense like pen an open letter dictating the singer’s love life, which might be the most basic white bitch thing to ever happen in basic white bitch history, outside of Hillary Clinton’s two presidential campaigns.
Still, BWB are right every once in a while. The careers of Sinatra, Elvis, the Beatles, T. Rex, Shania, ABBA, to name a few, are built on the broad shoulders of the BWB. Rumours and Tapestry and Bat Out of Hell all probably would have been fine-selling albums without them, but not sources of generational wealth that are going to make, say, the descendants of Meat Loaf grandfathered into the landed, old-money gentry sometime around the midway part of the century. And yes, they’re right about Taylor.
I don’t remember when I started paying attention to her. Probably after Fearless. Maybe around the time of the Kanye VMA incident, and only then just to see if this little pop country ingénue was worth the fuss everyone seemed to be making about her at the time. Skeptical upon first listen, I found that, yes, she absolutely was. The girl is a stone-cold songwriter. Tossing off melodies like she was touched by the divine hand of Paul McCartney, as deft and clever at lyrically kissing people off as mid-Sixties Dylan, as adept at crafting a hooky chorus as Brian Wilson or one of her childhood idols, Carole King. She was seemingly born speaking verse/chorus/bridge.
Taylor Swift is, simply, the finest tune crafter of the last generation — maybe even the last two. Her written corpus, something like 230 songs deep at this point, is remarkably high-quality. There isn’t much filler there, no album is a clunker (Lover is an electropop masterpiece), and a handful of her songs (“You Belong With Me,” “Shake It Off,” “Blank Space,” “Love Story,” “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”) I can guarantee will be immortal — still frequently played on the jukeboxes of the bars in a colonized Mars by basic Martian bitches out for a raucous night of validating the living shit out of each other.
It’s unfortunate that Taylor’s craftsmanship, her consistency, her genius (and I don’t use that word lightly) gets overshadowed by her celebrity, either yearned for or unwanted, because she truly is one of the greats. You owe it to yourself to investigate her. She’s one of the few singers/songwriters/bands whose work I have a visceral, emotional connection to, and I love it all.
I love how “Our Song” from her debut record is like a hit of nostalgia fired into my mainline, bringing vividly back to life those sophomore-year, first-love conversations. I love that I can do key bumps in the bathroom stall of a dive bar to basically any song on Reputation. I love that you can literally hear her smile through your speakers while singing the last verse of “Ours.” I love how much time I can waste thinking about how I would have mixed the horns on “Sweet Nothing.” I love that I could genuinely listen to “Cruel Summer” fifty times in a row and never cease being excited by it, and I love that I can’t listen to “Ronan,” a charity single about a mother reminiscing the death of her sickly toddler son, ever again because doing so will instantly turn me into a giant tub of wrecked, sobbing goo.
I commiserate with my friend Logan about her inability to score Eras Tour tickets, listen patiently when my friend Tess goes on a five-minute monologue on why Tay Tay should be a dog person (she’s an unabashed cat lady), do stupid BuzzFeed quizzes like “Which Taylor Swift Album Matches Your Personality?” with my friend Christie, and shit on her exes with all three.
I am, simply put, a Swiftie, proud and true, Forever & Always.
