By Michael F. Duggan
Okay, so I am not a part of Taylor Swift’s target audience, and I would be surprised if I have listened to more than a dozen of her songs. But like her or not, pop music’s billion-dollar woman is impossible to ignore.
I have noting against Swift. She is clearly talented and protects energy and a positive image for her legions (armies, really) of young fans, or Swifties. The fact that she has tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of enthusiastic followers who are willing to shell-out big bucks for albums and sold-out concerts corroborates this. They, and in some cases their parents, love her and her music, and there is no reason to think that they are faking it. But does she warrant such acclaim and pecuniary reward?
Right after Swift’s Eras tour broke the billion-dollar mark, a friend of mine called me and asked me what I thought of her. In truth I think about her fairly little, other than during the occasional news story. Of her relationship with what’s-his-name, the football player, I couldn’t care less. To be fair, at 34, she is now a veteran in a cutthroat business that makes extreme demands on touring musicians, and her first album, released in 2006, is now older than many of her fans.
But my friend’s point was that, taken on her artistic merits, she seems to be a kind of patron saint for the mediocrity that characterizes so much of the music of our time. I listened to some of her songs and they struck me as unobjectionable, if unexceptional, and possessing verve and confidence. Her lyrics occasionally rose to the level of moderate (if unexceptional) inspiration. She also has a nice voice, and her songs sound overly-worked to me in a technological sense (like some of Beyonce’s songs). But is the whole package worthy of a clean billion for a single (albeit long) tour? I suppose a free trader would argue that anybody who can make that kind of money legally in a free market deserves it. Perhaps. But as regards aesthetics, I disagree.
It is pointless to argue over taste and preferences, but I think that we can make meaningful qualitative statements about art and entertainment. For instance, do Swift’s songs, which speak so powerfully to her fans, rise to the level of the nearly universal appeal of the better songs by the Gershwins, Hoagy Carmichael, Lennon and McCartney, Cole Porter, Rogers and Hart/Hammerstein, Schubert, Simon and Garfunkel, or Fats Waller? Are her lyrics as fresh and original as those of Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, and the better acts of the British Invasion during the early and mid 1960s? Does her musical virtuosity push the limits to the same degree as the young Louis Armstrong, Big Beiderbecke, Sidney Bechet, Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Jimi Hendrix, Stanley Jordan, Anita O’Day, Charlie Parker, Django Reinhardt, or The Who? Does her voice, although good, carry the depth of feeling of a Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, Judy Garland, Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin, Patsy Cline, Roy Orbison, Otis Redding, or Hank Williams? Is her voice as fine as Sarah Vaughn or Ella Fitzgerald, as distinctive as Sinatra’s or Crosby’s, or as big as those of Aretha Franklin or Linda Ronstadt?
From what I have listened to so far, she does not rise to the level of any of these apples and oranges in these respective categories, and yet none of them ever made anything like a billion dollars in a single tour. During their first U.S. tour, The Beatles made an impressive minimum of $50,000 per concert (a little under half a million dollars when adjusted for inflation). By contrast, Swift makes between $10 and $13 million per concert. Is she really 20-26 times better than all four Beatles?
Where entertainment is powerful and singular, art is more subtle and multifarious, leading to innumerable interpretations and reactions. There is of course a huge grey zone between the two. Using this distinction, it seems to me that Taylor Swift has both feet in the entertainment category as a runaway pop sensation, although possibly not as an entertainer (much less and artist) for the ages. Time will tell, and I may be wrong. But then, even all these years later, I still don’t understand the unwaning appeal of Michael Jackson, Madonna, or Britney Spears among their fans.