celeb news UK newspaper calls Taylor's music "uninteresting, repetitive and entirely basic"

[midnightdawn]

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As her Eras Tour gathers ever-increasing gravity-defying momentum, I find myself wondering what on earth the ubiquity and homogeneity of her music says about the state of popular music today.

Growing up, we had Madonna, who combined electrifying performances with a truly trailblazing agenda of barrier-breaking subject-matter. She embraced gay pride, sex, challenged the Catholic church, supported the Aids movement, and completely and utterly reinvented the way society perceived women. Her music was interesting, experimental and varied.

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By comparison Swift's music sounds to me like what I would listen to if I had the intellect of a very small worm. Not only is it uninteresting, repetitive and entirely basic, her lyrics are brain-numbingly banal. Take the following: "You smoked, then ate seven bars of chocolate/We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist/I scratch your head, you fall asleep/Like a tattooed golden retriever." Or "My muses, acquired like bruises", or "even statues crumble, if they're made to wait".

It's all absolute nonsense.

 

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More a brand than an artist, she never says anything unexpected or controversial, she's more a capitalist construct with a business and marketing operation behind her akin to a like-generating, algorithm-outwitting juggernaut.

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I physically flinch when adults tell me they love Swift. I see her as the canary in the coalmine, a talisman of our dystopian times where devices have stolen our imagination and ability for critical thought.

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.

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So how does that work then when the only memorable element in her lyrical oeuvre seems to be an obsession with her failed relationships with men. Am I the only person who finds that incredibly reductive? Can you imagine a man constantly defining themselves by who they used to date? It's laughable, and highly regressive.

I'm not expecting her to sing about transcendentalism but it would be good to see a bit more brainpower at play.

https://www.standard.co.uk/comment/taylor-swift-eras-tour-hegemony-social-media-music-madonna-b1163540.html

 

Edited June 16 by midnightdawn

[The7thStranger]

Like I've said many times: Taylor's writing style is young adult fiction. It's had that quality since the start of the career, and all these albums later, it seems like it's here to stay. Maybe you love it, maybe you don't. I liked some of her stuff, but I got bored of her real quick. She's a competent songwriter, but an incredibly dull one incapable of challenging the listener.

 

Madonna's discography has far more dimension, but to be charitable, we can't pretend she didn't give us Killers Who Are Partying and Funana.

[piotrert]

9 minutes ago, midnightdawn said:

By comparison Swift's music sounds to me like what I would listen to if I had the intellect of a very small worm.

they should do background checks and forbid stan twitter gays to write articles, im not reading this **** further

[XtinaStripped]

Taylor Swift's following is just a cult at this point. I agree with everything in the article.

 

I actually googled "what is the appeal with.." the other day and google finished my sentence with her name.

Edited June 16 by XtinaStripped

[Jay07]

They answered their own question. She's the final form of a capitalistic music industry that only exists to push variants. No artistry, no point of view, no courage. Just variants. If she didn't already exist, they would have to invent her. 

[KatyPrismSpirit]

Can they please just stick to calling out her greedy chart obsessed practices and pointing out that she is a self-absorbed, egocentric, anti-woman capitalist? Even if some lyrics suck from that last album, it still has some decent songs. 

 

[Bewitched]

I would've agreed with this article if the author had at least named some of Taylor's peers that are doing more interesting music than her 

 

The article starts with them discussing popular acts of the 90s 

 

its just giving bitter gen x 

[Rep2000]

Not this clickbait tabloid lol! Smart of them to try to appeal to her parasocial haters tbh.

[Kavish]

I understand the criticisms but the fact that millions flock to her tour means she is doing something right. I feel like people who don't understand her appeal greatly underestimate the emotional aspect of music, and this is something Taylor excels at. Her music may not be as pushing as Madonna was, but people have always gravitated towards Taylor because of how she makes them feel, connect, and relate.

[Kristie Kuwa]

Wow, the article perfectly describes how I feel about Taylor

[Mandalore]

I physically flinch when adults tell me they love Swift.

 

Tell me you're mentally ill without telling me you're mentally ill. I'm sure a lot of Atrl will see themselves in this "article"  See if I were jobless, I'd make a thread about every single positive article from actual UK newspapers about her and the Eras Tour but then again it's been quite fascinating watching a lot of regular culprits in this thread sink deeper into parasocial hatred of her than the fans they claim to look down on.  Like, I used to think Taylor Swift was really impactful but I'm still getting surprised at how irrational and vitriolic she makes her haters. I pray life gives y'all some actual problems to worry about though, because it's giving chronically online dwelling that's literally rotting your brains. 

 

 

 

 

Edited June 16 by Mandalore

[glitch]

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Admittedly the intellectually challenged of my generation also embraced Take That and the Spice Girls, but the rest of us also had The Prodigy, Elastica, The Cure, Blur, Pulp, The Smiths, The Stone Roses, Nirvana. Crucially, we had so many options of what we could like and dislike and so much of it was alternative. Not only was the music thought-provoking and imaginative, but the lyrics were meaningful and caught the spirit of a generation.

I don't even like Taylor but this person sounds miserable. Calling people "intellectually challenged" because of the music they listen to is is based in nothing but pretention.

 

We also have options of what to like and dislike. We don't all have to listen to Taylor Swift if we want to. Alternative music still exists in 2024, even if the author isn't listening to it.

[Jay07]

3 minutes ago, Kavish said:

I understand the criticisms but the fact that millions flock to her tour means she is doing something right. I feel like people who don't understand her appeal greatly underestimate the emotional aspect of music, and this is something Taylor excels at. Her music may not be as pushing as Madonna was, but people have always gravitated towards Taylor because of how she makes them feel, connect, and relate.

People connect to her because everything she does is homogenous and unthreatening. She's the Disney channel. Nothing ever changes. The same songs, the same looks, the same high school outlook on life. She's reliable and that lulls her fans into a sense of security and familiarity. They always know what they're getting but that's not art. That's mass comsumerism.

[Gorjesspazze9]

I mean it's pop music 

[Arrows]

Which one of y'all wrote this?

[Eat The Acid]

That's exactly how id describe her music 

[Jay07]

10 hours ago, Gorjesspazze9 said:

I mean it's pop music 

Madonna, Prince, Janet, David Bowie, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga. All massive popstars. Pop doesn't have to mean artless and juvenile. It's just that audiences have become so dumbed down and complacent they actually want the same content warmed over and served back to them over and over because it's not challenging or confrontational. She literally sells her old albums back to them in multiple variants, that's how low the standard is. Literally a capitalism wet dream.

Edited June 16 by Jay07

[CherryBay]

[Rihannito]

I have been saying this for ages. I was a Taylor stan from her debut till the red album. She was really unique and her songwriting was top notch. And then, she wanted more success and suddendly decided to go pop, which felt so unoriginal to me and made me lose intrest in her. Every album she has released after was unintresting and not on par with her past work ( folklore being the only exception). Now the only thing she cares about is numbers, accolades and breaking other females records. She is spamming us with releases every 3 months just to stay on top and block other artists that are decades younger than her. She is competing with herself at this point. To me, this is psychopath behaviour. The thing that she might not understand is that, those females she wants to top so badely have more than just numbers, they have been pioneers and trailblazers.

[JJZAW]

She's just a bad person in general and her fans are too blind to see that

[SylMacPer]

There's a serious problem with the woman writing this "article".

 

First of all it's just her opinion! Then she's extremely rude to people who like Taylor's music, belittling them and their intelligence! At the same time she only compares her to artists from the 80s & 90s and most of them are Rock acts!  She clearly doesn't know or like Pop music! Giving an example of one lyric from a song as a "bad lyric" actually cancels the examples of amazing writing from older and better Taylor records. 

 

Also, trashing Taylor for writing about her relationships is so 2012! In a world where it is accepted for rappers to call women "b*tches", I find it offensive when women criticise other women about singing/writing about their failed relationships. That is such a boomer approach to an evolving pop culture! 

[Petra von Kant]

ok, to be fair, her music isn't all that much repetitive, not that it would be bad if it was, but it just isn't

 

as for the other two tho.....

 

I can't say I disagree

Edited June 16 by Petra von Kant

[The7thStranger]

1 minute ago, SylMacPer said:

Also, trashing Taylor for writing about her relationships is so 2012!

I think it's disingenous to downplay the signifiance of what Taylor does. She has a massive audience, and she knows what she's doing in turning her legions of fans against people she claims to have once cared about. And it's one thing to write a few songs about people who have majorly impacted your life, but it's nasty to do it constantly and then paint yourself as some big victim. I think Matty Healy is an awful person, for example, but the fact that most of that new album is clearly about him (while she also stomps her feet and throws a tantrum about why that wasn't problematic) speaks volumes about her character.

 

I would be seriously weirded out if a guy I dated for a few months wrote an entire album about me. So either she's doing it because she's immature and doesn't see how unhealthy that is. Or she's just using people as fodder to get attention and to get people to buy her albums. Which is it? Either way, she is a creep.

 

Alanis on when she wrote Unsent:

 

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This is a song called "Unsent". And I wrote this song last summer, started off by writing the first verse and.... once I wrote about this one particular person in a letter that I had not had the courage to send to them, I realized that there were about fifty people that I could write about but I wasn't sure that I wanted to write a song that was going to be an hour long so... I got the top five or six people that I really wanted to have closure with and I think it's... it was one of the most... closure-inducing songs to say the least, and some of them I actually finished the record and couldn't sleep for a long time because well there were several things on the record that made it so that I couldn't really sleep very well knowing that I was about to share it with a bunch of people. But this song in particular... I felt like I needed to call a few people before I actually released this song, so I did. And the song itself actually forced me to deal directly with these people because it's so easy to write a song about something... In the past something would happen to me and I would run somewhere and write about it, and not necessarily talk directly to the person. It was very convenient and it resulted in a lot of release but not necessarily in a lot of closure so, this song I thought I was gonna get away with that once again, and because I couldn't sleep I knew that I was, my plans were foiled. So I had to actually call these people and they were all very very sweet about it, they appreciated the fact that I called them. And now when I sing it I know that I can sing it with permission and blessing, really.^[3][4]

 

[storminthedark]

"Anna van Praagh is the Evening Standard's chief content officer" 

 

I'm the first person to call taylor out but this is just a poorly written article. It offers no cultural commentary other than "people stupid and taylor bland" yet the tone has a huge superiority complex. This is one of the examples of actual internalised misogyny levied at taylor, not the thousand other things Swifities claim.

[Rihannito]

1 minute ago, SylMacPer said:

There's a serious problem with the woman writing this "article".

 

First of all it's just her opinion! Then she's extremely rude to people who like Taylor's music, belittling them and their intelligence! At the same time she only compares her to artists from the 80s & 90s and most of them are Rock acts!  She clearly doesn't know or like Pop music! Giving an example of one lyric from a song as a "bad lyric" actually cancels the examples of amazing writing from older and better Taylor records. 

 

Also, trashing Taylor for writing about her relationships is so 2012! In a world where it is accepted for rappers to call women "b*tches", I find it offensive when women criticise other women about singing/writing about their failed relationships. That is such a boomer approach to an evolving pop culture! 

Completely agree. But i'm sure there are far more intresting subjects that she can evoke in her songs. Her failed relationships, her being the victim everytime and vengeance has been her main subjects besides some exceptions. Her latest effort being based on a relationship that has lasted for 3 months and her kim feud that is a decade old.  So yeah her music is so 2012, because she still lives in her early 20's days and refuses to grow up and touch more intresting subjects and lead the pack since she is the most succesful artist at the moment, instead she gives us lyrics like karma is a cat and releases albums with almost 40 songs and 133874646 variants for the sake of dinero 💰. After all, she is the daughter of Scott Kingsley Swift, so no surprise there.