Listening to albums is too much of a chore

[koganbot]

Quote of the day, from skyecaptain:

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? PLEASE.

Have only read some of the essays, but of the ones I read Chuck's was the only one I understood.

Comments

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Maura's and Rich's are great too, as expected. The-Dream one is not, the Animal Collective one makes me want to throw knives at everyone and if I read the Das Racist one I will ACTUALLY throw knives at everyone so it's best that I don't click on it.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I think the AC one is good actually - a pretty honest, open explanation of their appeal to at least some of their audiences. If you hadn't heard them and read it you'd be well equipped to work out whether you'd enjoy it or not, and the essay wisely leaves the "not" angle quite open.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Here's the offending passage I was referring to, may actually write a post about this:

Actual schoolgirl innocence was bliss for Taylor Swift, the red-state sweetheart made all the more innocent by Kanye West's interrupting-cow bit at the MTV Video Music Awards (triggered when Taylor beat out Beyoncé for a statue, and overshadowing Gaga's own bloody theatrics). Straight from the school of Mad Men's Peggy Olson, Swift commands attention through virtuosity, not sexuality, her teen rebellion cloaked in giddy couplets. By casting herself as Juliet in the blissful "Love Story," she reduces a Shakespearean tragedy to a dreamy, doe-eyed lunchroom crush: "Romeo, take me somewhere we can be alone/I'll be waiting, all that's left to do is run/You'll be the prince and I'll be the princess."

Does she know what she's doing? Not really. At just 20, she's merely playing to her strengths. But Swift, like Peggy, is increasingly aware of her power. She certainly owns the coyness, as was evident during her Saturday Night Live opening monologue, wherein she (adorably) sang, "I like writing songs about douchebags who cheat on me" and referenced "that guy, Joe [Jonas, you'll recall], who broke up with me on the phone," offering a quick shout-out: "Hey, Joe, I'm doing real well." It's true, Joe. Swift had a great year, the alpha female in sales and accolades, if not aggression.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

I'm reaching a little bit here -- not least bcz (i) i've barely given t.swift a listen and (ii) ditto AnCo -- but it strikes me that there's more going on than just a recalcitrant old guard failing to give uyp to the New Thing within a coherent culture; this gulf is beginning to remind me of the near-absolute non-communication between the plateauing midbrow jazz of the late 50s and the rock that rockwrite was seeking and celebrating from the early 60s

in lots of ways there were lots of potential routes from one sensibility to another -- and interestingly many of the key voices actually stood more between the two worlds than is always easily recalled (bangs and meltzer and leroi jones) -- but it felt like a stubborn inability to cede worth, on the part of the jazzniks mostly (older, and with an achieved aesthetic they didn't want to let go of); the "new thing" (free jazz or "fire music" as people today seem to prefer to call it) was a lot more a response to rock than it generally let on, or at the very least an expansion into the same kind of territory...

obviously there are differences also: i suppose i'm kiting the idea that the gulf WON"T be bridged, as it wasn't (and isn't) between the midbrow jazz sensibility and the dylan-jagger-iggy sensibility... ?

[koganbot]

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.