Someone called Taylor's music "mind-numbingly banal"

Rather blow up my whole life than listen to one more critic bitching and moaning

It’s me, hi. I’m the writer this time, it’s Kate Leaver. One quarter of the team behind Swiftian Theory, a newsletter for people who love the music of Ms Taylor Alison Swift.

Gather round, Swifties; we’ve been maligned.

Days ago, a British newspaper published a takedown of Taylor Swift fans so obviously, shamelessly designed to cause internet chaos in the pursuit of clicks that really we can only laugh.

Banal, basic, uninteresting? We’ve heard it all before. They’re the adjectives every disgruntled critic/man whips out when they’d like to undermine Taylor Swift. And the many millions of us to whom her music really, really means something.

At this stage, it’s banal, basic and uninteresting to keep insisting Taylor’s music is any of those things. If we each got a dollar every time someone called Taylor’s music banal, we’d all be able to afford Eras tickets.

Here’s one I hadn’t heard before, though. This is a direct quote from the article: “Swift’s music sounds to me like what I would listen to if I had the intellect of a very small worm.”

HA

HAHA

That’s actually very funny.

The comic value of this sentence totally erases any offence it might have caused, in my opinion. It’s so specific. Why bring worms into this? They’re just trying to eat organic material from the soil and mix it with their own waste to create a microbe-rich environment for plants to grow!!!! (I Googled “what do worms do”).

Credit where it’s due: it’s an original slight. I laughed and I laughed and I laughed. I was about 60 per cent amused, 30 per cent tired, 10 per cent angry. How can we truly take this insult seriously? It’s such a ridiculous thing to say. You could feed AI the brief “weirdly specific insult” and it would never come up with this.

HOWEVER

I was a very good school level debater (lol) and in debating we must first acknowledge the silliness of an argument and then meet that person where they are to demolish the it on their terms.

So. First of all, worms can’t hear music. Charles Darwin actually spent many, many hours playing the tuba and the piano to earth worms because he believed they were underrated creatures worthy of deep study. The outcome of his research was that, yes, they’re very cool little guys who contribute much to nature, but also, tragically, they did not react at all to music. So ANSWER ME THIS: how’s a worm going to have any taste in music at all if they can’t hear it? They could be wriggling around first row at a Taylor Swift concert and have no idea, the sweet little darlings.

I direct you, also, to this video by the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology called WORMS ARE CLEVERER THAN YOU THINK.

Furthermore! Hence! Also! Does anyone remember that study doing the rounds a while ago, that suggested intelligent people listen to Taylor Swift? An American website that matches students to college courses collected data on music listening habits and found that the highest achieving students listen to Taylor Swift.

What I’m saying is, this journalist should really have thought this through.

In all seriousness, how relevant is a person’s IQ anyway? The beauty, the magic, the everlasting joy of music is that it transcends all that. It makes us feel something - physically, emotionally. It makes us wanna dance! It makes us cry! Everyone deserves that experience, wherever they might fall on the spectrum between worm and Einstein.

I also really, really believe that Taylor uses language beautifully. She has such range: you can play her songs because they slap, or you can listen for the devastating truths about the experience of being alive. She’s an outrageously good performer, she’s basically an elite athlete, but she’s also a writer - one who does not deserve allegations of banality.

Come on, instead of “from winter to summer” she chooses “from fireplace ashes to sprinkler splashes”. Please, consider the visceral imagery of “my white-knuckled dying grip”. The devastating question, “did the love affair maim you?” The perfect narrative reveal in Last Great American Dynasty (“and then it was bought by me”). The clues! The specific references! The entire language she’s developed that only those who’ve been paying attention can decipher! And the humour? It’s iconic: “I’m having his baby, no I’m not but you should see your faces”.

The writer of this article does go on to make some more serious and more annoying points. Of Taylor, she says this: “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.”

We do ourselves a great disservice if we are demanding celebrities always stand for things. What if - radical idea - we listened to their music without forcing them to be political figures? Seriously. With Donald Trump circling the White House, we are ever closer to the total dissolution of common sense. I, personally, would rather not live in a world where we’re asking Justin Bieber his opinion on reproductive rights on the red carpet or Drake how to solve the climate crisis. Ask politicians, not pop stars, to do something about the dire state of society - and then go home, put noise canceling headphones on and listen to Out of The Woods till we feel better.

Look, I’m too tired and too wise to endlessly squabble about what is and isn’t feminist, but I actually love thoughtful criticism of Taylor Swift. Taylor makes mistakes and we’re allowed to talk about them, even as fans. She has the carbon footprint of a small nation, for example. Her last album was too long. She did Lana del Ray dirty on Snow on the Beach. Her merch is horrendous. She’s a billionaire… is there an ethical way of being a billionaire?

There are conversations worth having… I just don’t think yelling about the banality of her lyricism is one of them.

It’s not anti-feminist to criticise Taylor. But it is weird and incendiary to call her fans worms. Motive matters. This journalist did not set out to have a measured, interesting talk about why she dislikes Taylor Swift. Which, by the way, she’s allowed to do. In this case, she sat at her computer with the express purpose of creating controversy by saying mean things about someone a huge, huge number of people adore.

When you publicly criticise someone as famous as Taylor Swift, you’ve gotta set the tone for the response, because there will always be a response. If you’re going to start out by calling us stupid, and the music we love stupid too, it’s like texting every one of us to check if we’ve been to the pitchfork shop recently. It’s like waving a really big red flag at heaps of bulls. That’s the point here; absolutely the purpose of an article like this is to rile us up in pursuit of clicks, clicks, clicks.

Believe me, I know this tactic. I used to work for a website that lived and breathed this sort of thing. It’s cynical but it works; if you want a story to do huge numbers, find the prevailing opinion and publish something contrary, go after the majority, insult as many people as you can, say inflammatory things. Negative headlines attract more views, it’s why women’s magazines are always telling us we’re shampooing our hair wrong, or love is dead because this one reality TV couple broke up, or choosing the one mildly controversial thing someone said in an interview for the headline. It works! People click! People comment! People share! They say, have you seen this, can you believe it, oh my god. They… write entire newsletter posts about it.

Maybe I fell into her trap, but I couldn’t resist.

I am not personally offended by the weird mean article. I am exasperated by it. Tired. Mildly entertained.

And hey, next time I see a worm in the garden, I’m gonna think to myself: I wish he had the pleasure of listening to Folklore. I bet he’d love This is Me Trying.

Swiftian Theory is a newsletter run by four writers: Natasha Lunn, Satu Hämeenaho-Fox, Arielle Steele and Kate Leaver. We’d love to grow our community of Swift-loving readers so, please, if you like this sorta thing, tell all the worms you know!!!! xx