America Can Do Better Than Taylor
If Taylor Swift is what my family remembers most about our recent road trip, I’ll be sorely disappointed.
Listen to this story: If you’re in the car, or cooking, or just lazy… you can listen to me read this story for you, in the audio file below.
Driving miles and miles of highway, in the Western US, the thin cattle fences run long beside the road like endless spider webs. Collecting anything that blows their way, from the butter-yellow fields or gun-metal-gray road. Water bottles, birthday balloons, take-out wrappers… you name it. Along the most arid, remote stretches, tumbleweeds accumulate in the barbed wire, until the fences resemble dried-up hedgerows, with barely a barn in sight. Let alone a stately manor.
I saw all this with my own two eyes last week, as my family spent the first half of Spring Break driving across California and through most of Arizona, dipping in and out of Utah a handful of times, as we explored the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley and beyond.
My wife and I split the driving. I’m normally a keen passenger seat nap-taker, especially on a long straight road, but the scenery kept me alert. Particularly within the vast expanse of the Navajo Nation. Beyond those long, straight cattle fences, the landscape of Arizona shifts almost seamlessly between the flat and mountainous, cactus stung and pine tree rowed, bright sun and drifting snow. Your attention is rewarded.
It rained, hailed and snowed, in no particular order, and with little way for a car full of Southern Californians to tell the difference half the time. Then the sky would sweep open, into those bright blue horizons and candy floss sunsets that the four of us know so well.
Through it all, our soundtrack — on and off, but mostly on — was orchestrated by the most restless traveler amongst us; my six-year-old daughter. It will come as no surprise to anyone then, that she requested nothing but the same dozen or so songs by Taylor Swift. This too did nothing to promote passenger seat slumber. After seven days of unmitigated ear bashing, by the most popular person in the world, I have some notes.
It would be pointless to compare Swift’s songs to those in the Great American Songbook and I already risk sounding like an old crank as it is. But I think we can do better, America.
I said to a fellow music-loving, forty-something friend recently that I was glad my daughter was going through her time as a “Swifty” now. As the music seems perfectly fitting for a six-year-old. Best to get over it young, I suggested, and move on to something with more soul for her teens and beyond. This recent over-exposure has only strengthened my beliefs.
Because set against some of America’s most dramatic, beautiful and unmistakable landscapes, Swift’s songs sounded like the complete opposite. Plain, unadorned and utterly replaceable. Like the box-upon-box apartment buildings so common in almost every modern US metropolis. I get that the songs are catchy — even our ten-year-old, AC/DC-loving son can’t stop singing them — but is that all they are? Is this what all the fuss is about? I think we can do better, America.
I remember so fondly my first forays into America by car — before podcasts, satellite radio or playlists — when packing a few favorite albums or just the right mixtape could heighten the driver’s senses. Make those lonely hours so worthwhile. A long drive without the right music is like a corn chip without dip; so much less than it could easily be.
When I released my first record over twenty years ago, a lot of people referred to it as good driving music and I couldn’t have asked for a better compliment. I was trying to make a collection of songs that felt as equally Australian as American. Two large, highway-strung landscapes, ripe for good road trips and the tunes they deserve.
Granted, Swift was the perfect road trip music for my daughter, but not her old music snob dad. The early Swift songs, driven by ‘90s guitar “chunks” in the verses, preening electric fiddle sways and choruses signaled by blasts of what I can only describe as “church” guitar, reminded me how closely tied modern country music is to the horrors of Christian rock. A great shame in itself.
The later, gentle electro-pop Swift songs, filled with little more than whiny diary entries and a few timely injections of slang (just out-of-date enough not to come off as “urban”), define formulaic in a way that not even the recipes on a box of pancake mix could emulate. (Just add hormones.) Neither “era” fuels the sort of sonic adventurousness or lyrical depth that make popular music enriching, especially on the road.
All in all, the songs felt to my ears like the musical equivalent of the chicken strip and french fry meals, so ubiquitous on America’s Kids Menus, fueling my daughter along our way. The landscapes rushing past us spoke more poetry than any Swift lyric ever could. I’d understand if she was just a flash-in-the-pan, but the catalog is nearing 14 albums deep (not counting “Taylor’s Versions”). We’re in this for the long haul, America.
Bruce Springsteen once said that the sound of most male rock singers (including himself) was just a boy screaming, “Daddyyyyyyy!”, and I too can relate. Who then is Swift screaming to… countless, anonymous exes? Herself? She sure as hell isn’t screaming at her parents, they’re essentially her business partners after all.
None of this mattered to my daughter, of course. So again and again the car filled with versions of the same smooth melodies and plastic heartache, while I focussed on the shifting scenery outside the vehicle, or the perverse humor of hearing a six-year-old girl softly sing, “Boys only want love if it’s torrrturrrre…”.
Occasionally my wife would ask what I wanted to listen to, and I couldn’t even cough up an answer. My musical senses were utterly dulled. Unnourished. Anesthetized. We can do better, America.
For if a Dolly Parton song can evoke the smell of spilt beer and sweaty perfume, and Beyoncé’s cold champagne and nightclub smoke; Swift’s smell more to me like a pump of hand sanitizer in the back of an Uber Black. Convenient and luxurious, yet totally forgettable.
Contagious, sure. But hopefully curable, too. For all of us.
Geez, rack up them cheap shots!
Couldn't agree with you more. Listened to a number of her albums with waning enthusiasm. No heart to any of them, could be played in a lift and never disturb a passenger. But she has certainly got the undivided attention of Doris world wide. Some things you just can't explain.