So I’ve got a perspective on Taylor Swift which is actually pretty developed, because my wife is a super fan. Like I’ve probably given Taylor Swift ~5k of my money over the years level super fan. I’m sure you can all imagine how much Taylor Swift has been on in my car over the last 12 years.
She’s a legitimately great song writer and represents a very good trend in music. See, from my perspective as a modestly ugly person, MTV was a disaster for popular music. The industry consigned talented people to background roles because they weren’t good looking enough, and it pushed people who hadn’t earned it and very much couldn’t handle it forward. As a result we got some truly shitty popular music between ~1990 and ~2005.
Thankfully at the exact same time the industries level of control over who was going to be popular started to slip significantly.
So along comes Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift plays a terrific guitar and is a god tier songwriter but she’s a trash singer (every school with 500 kids in it has 2-3 kids in show choir with vastly better vocal equipment than Taylor Swift… she’s such a gifted songwriter that she hides it almost entirely), and while moderately attractive she’s not in the same league as your typical late 90’s early 2000’s pop star. If her parents weren’t well heeled and well connected finance types or she arrived 10 years sooner she would have spent the first 20 years of her career as a probably very successful working songwriter. But it was 2004 and between herself and her parents there was more than enough leverage for her to get a record deal and get it properly promoted.
Truthfully there are worse people for your kids to use as role models than Taylor Swift. She’s handled her entire career quite well, seems like a decent human being considering the circumstances, and is legitimately talented.
I think it’s notable that in a thread where probably >50% of the people haven’t heard a single Taylor Swift song that wasn’t on the radio there were 4-5 songs that they were happy to post as evidence that she’s good… and none of them was all too well which is generally what most critics think is her best track.
Interestingly I’m not a huge fan myself mostly because I’m getting saturation bombed with it. If it was anything worse than decent this would be the reason I had gotten divorced years ago.
TLDR: Don’t be the idiot who says that someone else is responsible for the TS sound. TS is where she is because she can create that sound out of close to whole cloth at will. She’s a slightly above average looking white girl from Pennsylvania with a pretty shitty voice… who thankfully for her is a Paul McCartney/ Elton John level hit creator (age appropriate comparison made for context for the older people haha). When she brings in collaborators it’s because she wanted the sound of her next album to go in that direction, and she’s the one who made that call not anyone else.
I cannot be clear enough about this, when people made this argument seriously the first time after her second album she made her entire third album on her own to give them the finger… and it’s the same quality level as the rest. That album is pretty entertaining when listened to in context actually. She goes out of her way to write really good songs about stuff she has obviously lolzero experience with, genre switches all over the place, and generally demonstrates an insane level of understanding of the musical trends of the time.
