Frank Kogan

Why on earth won't someone who wants to talk about Taylor Swift's "image" please listen to her album fucking ONCE before they write things about her?

I'll take a serious shot at answering this, though my answer is speculation, since I don't know anything about Clover Hope other than her lousy P&J essay: she doesn't listen to the album (or doesn't listen with engaged attention) for the same reason that someone will reference my book without reading it, or critique what I said about Paris Hilton without reading what I said about Paris Hilton, or will explain my PBS metaphor without reading the passages in which I created and used the PBS metaphor, etc. It's that these people think they already know what's going to be there, so they don't think they have to listen or look. Or when to a small extent they do listen and look they do so with no understanding, since they only see and hear what they want to and go in with the idea that there's nothing new to learn here.

You ought to check out Geoffrey Himes' essay for this year's Nashville Scene Country Music Critics Poll, since Himes thinks Taylor is pretty great but he nonetheless ends his essay insisting that Taylor needs to learn from country mentors about the country heritage, but he doesn't grasp (1) that she already has mentors (e.g. Liz Rose) and a heritage that she almost certainly knows something about, whether or not it matches up with what Himes thinks her heritage needs to be, and (2) that he and we and some country artists etc. have something to learn about country and about life from her.

The affliction here is the need to always feel that one knows better, in advance.