Great post, Ross. The political groupthink into which we have fallen (quite willingly and enthusiastically, unfortunately) in the age of social media has infected every aspect of our being--including our cultural and artistic preferences.
It reveals some rather depressing thoughts. We value and strive for acceptance within a group (left or right) more than adhering to independent thought. Indeed, our preferences aren’t even our own anymore. We look around first just to make sure we are liking the right thing.
I don't understand the appeal of Taylor Swift. I couldn't name a single song of hers and I listen to music pretty much all day long. I've long ago mostly tuned out top 40 pop stuff when I'm in groceries, airports and other public places where it's beamed in like muzak. The "hives" that people build around pop stars like this is absurd, and often deranged (I think of Beyonce's "fans" driving the owner of the LA Clippers' wife off social media because of a perceived slight).
It should be noted that there have been plenty of articles the last couple of months about how the music industry just can't seem to break any other pop stars, other than Swift, and how she's the lone success story in a failing industry. There are a multitude of reasons why the music industry has failed itself, but a few months ago, Taylor Swift was essentially the only artist on the Billboard top 10 singles chart, which really means the music industry has stopped functioning as a business altogether.
You'd think the music industry would look at the success of a fantastic independent artist like King Gizzard and Lizard Wizard, who's releasing 4-5 albums a year on their own label, playing the biggest non-stadium rooms around the world (and doing what I've heard is an absurd amount of merch per show) all without any radio or media support, or the fact that most of the top-grossing tours are still aging classic rockers and think: "hey, maybe we're not serving large segments of the record-buying and concert-attending public, and we should maybe do that?" But of course they don't, in favor of more PR-placed Taylor Swift hagiographies.
The Oliver Anthony story is related. I don't know that I've seen such a zeitgeist musical moment in decades. A totally unheard of artist records a brief, heartfelt working class anthem that not only goes mega-viral, but leads to the artist taking over the top spot on iTunes music and another 6 spots in the top 20. While I don't think it's necessarily a great song, I could hear immediately why the song resonated so deeply with so many people. I watched about 10 YouTube reaction videos on channels hosted by self-described apolitical African American working class types and they loved it. Some cried.
Seeing internet galaxy brain types (like world's densest man Nathan Robinson and Eoin Higgins ) who fancy themselves leftists, but are really top-down class warriors for the laptop class, "fact check" the Oliver Anthony song, or tell people what it should have said to be "truly working class" (from men who've never "worked" a day in their life), or explain why people's emotional reactions to the song is wrong is just disgusting. These are not people who care about working class unity; they care about their Brooklyn Brands.
Maybe the industry would do well to cater to music people want to hear, and maybe politically-inclined people would do well to empathize with the way that people they don't understand feel. Instead, music industry journals — mostly now about politics and written by and for Brooklyn's laptop warriors — do hit pieces about how the song is "bad" or "wrought" or "problematic."
It should be noted that the laptop class freaking out about this stuff only makes it more popular. When I looked at the iTunes charts a couple of days ago, Oliver Anthony had 5 songs in the top 10. The culture-war-approved cover of "Fast Car" and the culture-war-heavy "Small Town" schmaltz were also there, as well as one Taylor Swift track — who comes from the country scene herself — and filled out by tracks by K-Pop artist V. Eight country-oriented tracks (mostly those caught up in Twitter battles) and two K-Pop tracks in the iTunes top 10 should tell the music industry, and the professional pundit class, that they're doing something wrong.
Minor but I don't think it makes sense to look at the iTunes top 10 to gauge something's general popularity anymore...I mean who buys music on iTunes these days?
A lot of music industry energy seems to be focused on a rapid succession of indeterminate vaguely-chillwave, vaguely-edm, vaguely-poppy young female artists - almost as a rule the daughters of big producers - who "get big" on Spotify, have about one year where anyone talks about them, and then disappear somewhere. Olivia Rodrigo is the biggest current one, I think. Billie Eilish has been the only one with any enduring popularity - she at least has a unique image even if her music is generic so that doesn't surprise me. There are dozens of others. Most of them have careers lasting age 18 to age 19.
This music resulting from this phenomenon was termed "Spotifycore" or "Streambait" as early as 2018 - https://thebaffler.com/downstream/streambait-pop-pelly - the big thing being that, to do well with Spotify's algorithms, it's good if your song is good and accrues likes & listens, but what matters most is not getting skipped. Getting skipped too much is a red card. This favors inoffensive "muzak" music, because anything inventive or original will probably irritate some people and accrue fatal skips even if it pleases most people more than generic stuff.
Another subtler factor at play here is that counting streaming plays in the charts has enabled career-buying in several much more direct ways than existed previously. You can pay Spotify directly to promote your song on their in-house playlists - a heck of a lot easier than paying disparate radio DJs across the country. You can pay popular brands like Nike to put your song in their Spotify playlists - "Who listens to a Nike playlist," you might be thinking. It turns out the answer is lots of people. You can also pay popular "playlist influencers" to put your song on their playlists. Lastly you can pay view farms to play your new song on repeat - since a free Spotify account is, uh, free, this costs next to nothing. In all of these situations, a generic & inoffensive song that can slot perfectly into any vaguely-edm, vaguely-chill playlist will outperform a unique song that might not be so universally playlistable.
Usually these novel promotional tactics are not utilized by the artists themselves but rather by their record label & agent & various henchmen thereof - as long as someone will foot the bill until the newly "discovered" artist is self-sustaining. If an artist doesn't get there within a year or so, they seem to get dropped like a rock. Artists in the Spotify genre could well be talented people but the algorithm has incentivized a uniform product.
Of course Billboard, iTunes, the Grammys, and all of those similar markers really don’t mean anything anymore. It should be noted that the Oliver Anthony song is also the top song on Spotify, which doesn’t really mean anything either; a huge Spotify hit does not necessarily equate actual, real-world success.
We don’t know if this Anthony thing will amount to anything, but it’s still a zeitgeist popular music moment that’s bigger than anything we’ve seen in ages. Beware those who ignore it.
I think there is something in the wind but I don't think it's more of this. I think there is a coming Great Realignment in which "brown people" - don't blame me, official progressive terminology - will make a break from the white liberal zeitgeist & coalesce with each other. This will be a "dangerous new conservatism" in the eyes of certain so-called progressives - it will be anti-genderist & anti-racialist - but it will probably be relatively more pro-education and pro-labor than contemporary mainstream conservatism. You could reasonably describe this as "Christian Democracy Plus," since it will align Catholic Latinos and disparate Christian groups of every ethnicity with Muslims, Hindus, and socially traditional Asians. (Who will each bring with them far more interesting & diverse music - like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXT0yK46RuA as an example. Heard at a local pizza place owned by an Egyptian Christian family).
But for this to happen, contemporary mainstream conservatism needs to die. It's too uncool and it's far too fat, sweaty, and white. Not that the New Thing won't include lots of white conservatives, but it'll be younger and cooler ones in the main. I'm personally scanning the horizon for a grungy, edgy young Latino artist with a skin & bones look, a cynical take on everything, and no fear of cancellation by white liberals. Every day I grow more certain that the path to the New Thing runs through some yet undiscovered Hispanic Kurt Cobain.
My whole point is that Taylor Swift becoming the sole attraction of the music industry, along with a sudden maelstrom of attention around an unknown kid playing a working class song points to the twin, and intertwined, failures of the music industry and the pundit class. I don't think we're in any way in for a trend of farmers with hit songs, but people do thirst for art they find more honest, or just more entertaining. Some conservative-coded movie hits in the multiplexes, as well as way off the beaten track indie horror hits like "Terrifier 2" doing big business likewise point towards a movie industry that's seemingly stopped caring about what people actually want.
I don't think the Oliver Anthony situation is necessarily a politically conservative coded one, as much as a paean to working class solidarity. Entertaining YouTube videographer Matt Orfalea, who briefly worked for the Bernie campaign because of a viral Bernie-supporting video, obviously noticed the same reactions, across political and racial lines, that I did on YouTube and made a nice video documenting it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSIgQNarGWs&pp=ygUMbWF0dCBvcmZhbGVh
I agree there's likely some sort of realignment in the air, but who knows if it's going anywhere. I listened to a few interviews with Sohrab Ahmari about his new book the last few days, and while Ahmari considers himself a conservative because of his social views, his economic ideas are to the left of almost everyone in the federal government, and even he admits that the realignment likely stalled because Republicans really just want to wage culture wars with Democrats. I'd argue that that's true, but the inverse is that Democrats mostly only define themselves by their hatred of Trump, his supporters, and even lefties and other heretics who don't agree with some of their more extreme conspiracies and civil liberties violations (although they seem to love the neoconservatives now, who have mostly bec0ome Democrats). Until people can focus on actual policy, nothing is changing.
As far as a new art for the people, I'd love to see it. My biggest gripe — and it's a massive one — with the Brooklyn Laptop Class is that they've mostly been the destroyers of art. Liberal/leftie institutions and cities had been the stewards of art and culture for generations, and the millennial/gen z types of a decent level of privilege and education — who got turned on to once-thriving underground art movements and cheap arty bohemian neighborhoods around the country via social media — infiltrated those scenes and neighborhoods en masse and degraded independent art, music and film until it was a mediocre celebration of themselves, while ultra-gentrifying affordable and arty parts of Brooklyn, Austin, Portland, LA, etc., to the point where almost no one could afford them. They were careless destroyers, and they've now turned towards old world cultural institutions and politics, and they're not doing any better with those.
With regard to your last paragraph, the bird's-eye view is generally correct, but the result we see is really a coalescing of numerous trends. As far as the general abrogation of "high culture" in the traditional sense by academics & other white respectables, it's important to consider that way, way more people now attend college than used to. This makes current & recent college attendees a far more socioeconomically & culturally diverse group than they would have been 50 years ago, which is certainly good in some ways, but it also means there is less of a shared background & cultural milieu. In other words, long gone are the days when you could just bust out talking about a work by Keats or Dickens in a college class and expect everyone to have read it or at least to know its general contours.
And I absolutely do not mean to imply that anyone is to blame more than white people for this phenomenon - if anything most ethnic minority groups seem a lot more interested in traditional high culture than the average white person is today - rather that it's a result of expanding college enrollment and declining primary education in "high culture" among white people. We've crossed a tipping point where such knowledge can now no longer be assumed for a white-collar or higher-ed audience.
So we have a lot of people who consider themselves educated and hip but who in fact have extremely shallow cultural educations. These people are not newspaper readers, they are not even New Yorker readers, they are not crossword-doers, they are not opera-goers, they do not play instruments, they are not jazz fans, they are not even into folk. Such people are attracted not to centers of "high-effort culture" but rather to centers of "effortless cool." They want to be *where* art is done, but they do not *do* art themselves, and neither do they *buy* art. Their walls are, rather, strung with fairy lights from Target. To them a "cafe scene" is a Starbucks filled with yuppies each scrolling alone.
This is also to some extent an inevitable result of the social media exposure you mentioned. Where once knowledge of "hip stuff" was transmitted person-to-person or via niche media, now it can be accessed en masse. Rather than "local scenes" in the arty areas of each city, we now have a global-scale effect, where everyone not just in the US but on the planet who wants to live in "the cool place" moves to Brooklyn if they can afford it (or their parents can).
Yet hipsters lived in Brooklyn in the 90s not just because it was cheap and arty. They lived there because it was close to Manhattan's cultural centers. They wanted to live somewhere cheap and still be able to access Manhattan culture - in fact they themselves were only pushed into Brooklyn when Greenwich Village got too pricey. The Brooklynities who've replaced them in pursuit of their coolness don't care about Manhattan high culture. They didn't move to Brooklyn to be near Manhattan, they moved to Brooklyn to be in Brooklyn.
It's a quite fundamental difference. It's still very possible to live somewhere affordable with good Manhattan access - Hudson & Essex counties in northern New Jersey have excellent Manhattan access while still being relatively very cheap - and these areas are rich with hipsters now, while current-Brooklyn-types are allergic to the grittiness and equally allergic to the "uncoolness" of a NJ address vs a NYC address, and don't actually care about Manhattan access.
So I think it's more that the people inhabiting these higher-ed & white-collar spaces are just not the same group of people they used to be. The college-attending demographic is now 30% of the population rather than the 3-5% it was a few short decades ago. The group is now just too large to effectively act as "stewards of culture" even if they still consider themselves to be such. What we see as the same group's "fallen" talent for creative output and taste curation is actually a result of its broadening and dilution, and the resulting lowering of its standards has happened simply due to a lowest-common-denominator mechanism. The 3% still exist but they've been drowned out or shouted off their former pedestal by these less-culturally-educated newcomers (who are, again, just as white if not whiter than the original 3%). .
If you want to find a group actually interested in high culture, you should look for people actually exposed to elements of high culture in their education. This is, today, far more true of Asian people than white people, as one example. If you're looking for someone who would recognize Brahms by ear but not Swift, you'll have much more success looking among Asian New Jerseyans with degrees in CS working in tech fields than you would looking among white Brooklynites with degrees in art history working in marketing. The white Brooklynites *consider* themselves arty, and the Asian New Jerseyans *consider* themselves merely urban professionals, but their actual interests paint a rather opposite picture.
Well said, Ross. This has been my No. 1 issue with the social justice left over the years: they politicize the living shit out of every piece of art. Just like the old Moral Majority once did.
I've fallen out of love with movies lately because of how uber-politicized everything has become. I'm just so, so tired.
I actually really don't know if this song goes viral if its anti-Trump. And I've been thinking about the left-wing version of this song for two days. Does American Idiot count? Gang of Four? I really don't think left-leaning political music that anyone takes seriously gets this cringey. I can't think of a song about Obamacare. Maybe I'm too out of the loop, but music this explicitly pointed seems to be a product of the right only, inmy estimation.
It’s rare but not impossible. There are some talented reactionary filmmakers like S. Craig Zahler. Used to be more but as the media industry professionalized the social politics of cultural creators tended to move left (but only in ways that don’t threaten their financial backers).
I'm not sure Zahler is even a conservative. I think because that Dallas Sonnier — who's certainly conservative — was producing his films, people assumed he was. When that really awful piece in Daily Beast came out that essentially took down all of those Sonnier-related ventures like Fangoria, Birth Movies Death, Rebeller, his production company, etc., the writer (horrible anti-journalist) Marlow Stern claimed Zahler was a conservative, but also radically misrepresented the themes and story of his Dragged Across Concrete movie — which I'm pretty sure he didn't actually watch — which lead me to not really trust anything in that article. (I actually already knew to never trust that writer. He's maybe the worst of all time.) After that piece, several other writers wrote contentious pieces about him, often trying to tie him to his characters, or producer Sonnier's politics, as if they demanded some fealty, or an apology from him. And Zahler mostly stayed coy about it.
I see Zahler around NYC, and while I don't know him, some of his behavior I've observed would lead me to believe he's a pretty bog-standard New York liberal. It's a shame that all that happened, because it doesn't appear that he's working, and he's become radioactive because of a lot of outright yellow journalism. He probably isn't interested in following Sonnier to Ben Shapiro's outlet, but if he can't get another movie made, who knows? It's a shame because I quite liked his movies — as did a lot of other people — which didn't seem in any way "reactionary," but more of a return to cathartic tough guy movies, but more ultra-violent than before.
Last week I watched The Santa Fe Trail, a 1940 Michael Curtiz film. The message from the film was that John Brown and other radicals were forcing us into a Civil War and the south should be left to settle its own affairs re: slavery. It's a beautifully made film with an amazing performance by Errol Flynn.
I would love to hear a single example of such a work of art that has been produced since WW2. Thus far I've got none!
The social justice left have become the new church ladies. The 'Try that in a small town' and this new 'Rich Men of North Richmond' tune are songs I'll probably never hear. Am I the only one? That these two songs are Racist!! to the SJW crowd, while Sexxy Redd's "PoundTown" is anodyne and not worthy of discussion, or City Girls "Throat Baby" (who cares about that right?) doesn't qualify under the 'misogynist' label .... it's all so tiresome and clownish.
The outrage is silly and the politicalization of everything is an avalanche of low energy.
While you may not be a "hater" of Taylor Swift, your account of her music comes across as dismissive to the point of ignorance - particularly when you say "her music, sonically pleasing and produced by committee on a quasi-regular basis, comfortably thrums through drug stores and elevator banks". As far as I am aware (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_songs_by_Taylor_Swift), the overwhelming majority of Taylor Swift's songs are ones that she wrote either alone or with one close collaborator (most notably Liz Rose, Jack Antonoff, or Aaron Dessner). There are exceptions - (the rather atypical) Lavender Haze has no fewer than 5 co-writers, and the same is true of a handful of others. But those aren't the songs that have made her so beloved by so many people.
And yes, they are probably "sonically pleasing". A less dismissive way of making the same point would be to say that she has perhaps the most remarkable gift for creating memorably haunting melodies of any musician in any genre that I can remember encountering. And it is surely that, not her politics or her avoidance of politics, that has created her exceptional popularity among people of all political backgrounds.
I personally love her music. I know (and care) nothing about her political ideas, and I certainly don't particularly expect her to share mine. I admire her for her musical genius, not her right-thinking (or otherwise). Trying to explain her popularity by ascribing a political slot to her is really to miss the point in a massive way. And I don't think that the fact that Emily Ratajkowski (someone I'd never heard of) missed the point in the opposite direction is any excuse.
Blank Space is maybe my favorite - it has 3 songwriting credits. She has such a huge catalog that there's plenty you can point to that supports your point, but I can find a large number of hits that were produced with a collaborator or larger team.
I don't ascribe her popularity to her politics. I'm simply saying she's been savvy (or cynical) enough to not alienate anyone. She's not one of the Dixie Chicks.
There was a time, years and ages ago, when writing a song with a "close collaborator" meant you wrote it with a bandmate, a friend, a lover, or someone else you had a personal relationship with - someone who you were, in other words, "close" to. That you use "close collaborator" to mean "paid professional songwriting assistance" without a hint of irony is a frightful sign of our times.
The resulting songs have certainly been the most catchy from a pop star since Carly Rae Jepsen's brief time in the mainstream - You Belong With Me, Bad Blood & Blank Space were undeniable earworms. Taylor Swift is also a powerful performer with impressive physical presence & self-evident charisma. The brand "Swift," like "Disney," is very much a corporate creation, but that doesn't diminish Swift songs any more than it diminishes Disney movies, and Taylor has had a stronger guiding hand than almost any other artist in the creation of her corporate self.
She's very evidently an exceedingly sharp person of business, and her ability in that arena has been key to her success to a vastly larger extent than her personal songwriting ability. If she hadn't had the performing talent & the looks to make a star of herself personally, she would probably be no less successful making stars of other people. Trying to say that such an exceptionally effective businesswomen's *real* strength is in songwriting is actually rather diminishing, to be honest.
I certainly did not intend to deny Taylor Swift's superlative business acumen, or to suggest that it does not play a major part in her success! But I don't think it would count for much without the songs to back it up - and she has had a far greater hand in the creation of most of those songs (including some great songs she wrote entirely alone) than Ross implied in his original post.
But I was more intrigued by the comment that you made at the start:
"There was a time, years and ages ago, when writing a song with a "close collaborator" meant you wrote it with a bandmate, a friend, a lover, or someone else you had a personal relationship with - someone who you were, in other words, "close" to. That you use "close collaborator" to mean "paid professional songwriting assistance" without a hint of irony is a frightful sign of our times."
I'm not sure exactly when that "time, years and years ago" was, but it wasn't the prewar period, when Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers were close collaborators on a commercial basis without being personal friends. Nor in the WW1 era, when the same was true of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannstahl. Nor in the 19th century, when the same was true of W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. Nor in the late 18th century, when the same was true of W.A. Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte. I don't know much about 17th century music or earlier - maybe you're referring to then :)?
It's true that in those earlier generations there was a stricter division of artistic labor: one person typically wrote the words, the other the music. But since the resulting works are a combination of music and words, I can't see why that should make a difference. And the nature of those remarkable partnerships was truly collaborative, as you can see if you read their surviving correspondence; the composer would make suggestions about the words, the lyricist would make suggestions about the music, and they would adapt and try new things out. How is that materially different from Taylor Swift and (e.g.) Jack Antonoff?
>I certainly did not intend to deny Taylor Swift's superlative business acumen, or to suggest that it does not play a major part in her success! But I don't think it would count for much without the songs to back it up
But...no, that's...that's exactly what you're doing, right there. She absolutely would be successful even if she didn't write a single word of her own songs. Her "true" level of songwriting ability - which is in fact unknowable - has a negligible bearing on her success, outside of her ability to take a higher cut of the proceeds of Swift Inc by filling multiple roles personally. Many pop queens never wrote a word, so pop stardom is plainly not contingent on songwriting ability.
Asserting that Swift's success is in any way contingent on her songwriting ability is in fact diminishing her abilities in these other arenas, which would almost certainly have carried her to pop success regardless. She doesn't just have "business acumen," she has more business acumen than almost anyone else on the planet, and certainly more than almost anyone else in the music industry. Her move outside of the country music environment was entirely self-precipitated and was opposed by basically every music industry person she worked with at the time, as one example.
The material difference you're looking for is that established songwriting teams with a history of mutual collaboration are quite a different thing from Jack Antonoff writing songs for Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, and just about everyone in between. Antonoff's personal fortunes are not even slightly tied to any one partner in rhyme and he's not particularly "close" to any one of his clients more than others, so far as we know . Wouldn't be good business for Antonoff Inc to let such a thing out anyway even if it were true. Anyway, you're essentially comparing married couples to polygamists and calling them equal because they both have sex.
"Her "true" level of songwriting ability - which is in fact unknowable"
This is an utterly bizarre comment. As I've repeatedly pointed out, Taylor Swift has written a good number of songs by herself, and they include some of her most famous and popular works - "Dear John", for example, or "Mean", or "Love Story". My own view is that those alone are enough to prove her a masterly songwriter. You may disagree - maybe you dislike those and the other songs she wrote by herself, and feel that they show her a poor writer. But love them or hate them, they give us plenty of evidence for her abilities one way or the other.
"The material difference you're looking for is that established songwriting teams with a history of mutual collaboration are quite a different thing from Jack Antonoff writing songs for Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, and just about everyone in between ... Anyway, you're essentially comparing married couples to polygamists and calling them equal because they both have sex."
[Sound of hairs being split finer and finer] Your original claim was that calling a paid partner like Antonoff a "close collaborator" was something new, because it used to require (in your words) a "personal relationship". Now you accept that a pair of people with no personal relationships at all can be "close collaborators" if they are "established songwriting teams with a history of mutual collaboration", and you claim that Swift and Antonoff are different from that.
But (in your terms), Mozart and Da Ponte were themselves "polygamists" - both of them worked far more with other people than they did with each other. Swift and Antonoff have a much more consistent long-term relationship than they did. The same is true of various other famous close collaborators, like Giuseppe Verdi and Francesco Maria Piave. There is really nothing new about Swift and Antonoff doing the same thing.
A songwriting credit is a contract item that determines how future royalties from a song will be divided. It is not inherently an accurate description of the process behind a song's creation. Song-wrights less famous than Antonoff often take a lump-sum payment for their services in lieu of future royalties and forego a songwriting credit for their contributions. Record labels likewise often have song-wrights on retainer who likewise don't get credited as songwriters on individual songs. As a result, any popular artist's "true" level of songwriting ability is in fact unknowable.
Antonoff is very plainly a preeminent consultant in the music-making industry who works for the highest bidder. Even if Swift has been a very high bidder for quite some time, it's not sensible to compare that to a collaborative process between peers. Your original claim was in fact that Swift 'closely collaborates' with numerous people in addition to Antonoff - numerous people who also happen to be veteran music industry song-wrights. These interactions could be collaborative or they could be strictly transactional - who's to say Taylor doesn't buy an Antonoff song and then tell him to get lost while she tailors it to her liking? - but that would be, again, an unknowable.
Swift is an excellently sharp businessperson & brand manager and it's just odd that you have a need to assert a certainty on these unknowables in addition to that..
I think it was She Hulk where this phenomenon really went over the top for me. I remember that show getting all sorts of praise and of course that praise centered its feminist message.
And then I watched She Hulk and it was... not good at all. "Men, Amirite" Tatiana Maslany offered to the camera as she rolled her eyes. "Mansplaining is the worst." This was a feminist message delivered with a sledgehammer. The show wasn't wearing its politics on its sleeve, it had pasted them onto the business end of a hammer and was bludgeoning me with it.
Despite that: endless praise! It was mystifying to me.
Having the right (for whatever definition of right you care to assume) politics isn't a substitute for artfulness, and yet that's the turn our culture has taken. That's not to say that Taylor Swift isn't artful; I have no idea. She's got some catchy tunes, mostly unobjectionable, but it's not my style so I don't much listen to her. But as you say, I certainly should be able to have that opinion without it like being some commentary on where I stand in our political culture wars.
I still think quality matters at the margins. Just as absurd as it is to say what Ratajkowski said would be to say Swift has no talent. There is a quality one must meet to become this level of superstar. But the era where taste mattered seems to be dying out. I don’t know if there are any “hipsters” anymore in the era of high rent, but I haven’t seen anyone explicitly hate on swift for being popular. Maybe this is the logical terminus on the long 180 degree tunnel from the gen X “sell out” period. There is no authenticity. There is no fake. There’s just a screen, a person, and sound.
is not universal. Hipsters are now to be found not in Brooklyn but in Nashville & New Jersey. Nashville I've only heard about, but I can tell you firsthand there are tons in NJ. I can just walk around and count the moustaches.
Where I am in NJ, I could walk into the Chipotle down the block and walk out with a $14.50/hr job covering my half of the rent and then some, no college degree needed. The Walmart ten minutes away is advertising $20/hr for full-time stockers. If there were four hipsters sharing my present digs - perfectly doable - and they all had day jobs as Walmart stockers, they'd each be earning $3200 a month pretax, on rent & utils of about $700 per month apiece - and they'd be 45 minutes on the PATH & subway from the Bowery Ballroom. That right there is math that attracts hipsters like flies to beer.
Sniffing the wind personally, my predictions for the next few years are Latin grunge, Asian emo, and Desi Girl Summer.
Part of what isn’t discussed here enough is that the cultural gatekeepers for far too long were rockist white guys. Country and hip hop sales had overtaken rock sales by early 90s but you wouldn’t have known that by the coverage of music. So a lot of “poptimism” issue is just an over correction for decades of delayed cultural ascendancy for artists who were often non white, non rock, non men etc.
To paraphrase Mencken, Swiftism seems to be the smoldering rage that comes with suspecting someone, somewhere, may not like Taylor Swift's music.
Great post, Ross. The political groupthink into which we have fallen (quite willingly and enthusiastically, unfortunately) in the age of social media has infected every aspect of our being--including our cultural and artistic preferences.
It reveals some rather depressing thoughts. We value and strive for acceptance within a group (left or right) more than adhering to independent thought. Indeed, our preferences aren’t even our own anymore. We look around first just to make sure we are liking the right thing.
Thanks for the reminder of Witchita Lineman. Great song
One of the best! I got into Glen Campbell after getting into the Beach Boys
I don't understand the appeal of Taylor Swift. I couldn't name a single song of hers and I listen to music pretty much all day long. I've long ago mostly tuned out top 40 pop stuff when I'm in groceries, airports and other public places where it's beamed in like muzak. The "hives" that people build around pop stars like this is absurd, and often deranged (I think of Beyonce's "fans" driving the owner of the LA Clippers' wife off social media because of a perceived slight).
It should be noted that there have been plenty of articles the last couple of months about how the music industry just can't seem to break any other pop stars, other than Swift, and how she's the lone success story in a failing industry. There are a multitude of reasons why the music industry has failed itself, but a few months ago, Taylor Swift was essentially the only artist on the Billboard top 10 singles chart, which really means the music industry has stopped functioning as a business altogether.
You'd think the music industry would look at the success of a fantastic independent artist like King Gizzard and Lizard Wizard, who's releasing 4-5 albums a year on their own label, playing the biggest non-stadium rooms around the world (and doing what I've heard is an absurd amount of merch per show) all without any radio or media support, or the fact that most of the top-grossing tours are still aging classic rockers and think: "hey, maybe we're not serving large segments of the record-buying and concert-attending public, and we should maybe do that?" But of course they don't, in favor of more PR-placed Taylor Swift hagiographies.
The Oliver Anthony story is related. I don't know that I've seen such a zeitgeist musical moment in decades. A totally unheard of artist records a brief, heartfelt working class anthem that not only goes mega-viral, but leads to the artist taking over the top spot on iTunes music and another 6 spots in the top 20. While I don't think it's necessarily a great song, I could hear immediately why the song resonated so deeply with so many people. I watched about 10 YouTube reaction videos on channels hosted by self-described apolitical African American working class types and they loved it. Some cried.
Seeing internet galaxy brain types (like world's densest man Nathan Robinson and Eoin Higgins ) who fancy themselves leftists, but are really top-down class warriors for the laptop class, "fact check" the Oliver Anthony song, or tell people what it should have said to be "truly working class" (from men who've never "worked" a day in their life), or explain why people's emotional reactions to the song is wrong is just disgusting. These are not people who care about working class unity; they care about their Brooklyn Brands.
Maybe the industry would do well to cater to music people want to hear, and maybe politically-inclined people would do well to empathize with the way that people they don't understand feel. Instead, music industry journals — mostly now about politics and written by and for Brooklyn's laptop warriors — do hit pieces about how the song is "bad" or "wrought" or "problematic."
It should be noted that the laptop class freaking out about this stuff only makes it more popular. When I looked at the iTunes charts a couple of days ago, Oliver Anthony had 5 songs in the top 10. The culture-war-approved cover of "Fast Car" and the culture-war-heavy "Small Town" schmaltz were also there, as well as one Taylor Swift track — who comes from the country scene herself — and filled out by tracks by K-Pop artist V. Eight country-oriented tracks (mostly those caught up in Twitter battles) and two K-Pop tracks in the iTunes top 10 should tell the music industry, and the professional pundit class, that they're doing something wrong.
Minor but I don't think it makes sense to look at the iTunes top 10 to gauge something's general popularity anymore...I mean who buys music on iTunes these days?
A lot of music industry energy seems to be focused on a rapid succession of indeterminate vaguely-chillwave, vaguely-edm, vaguely-poppy young female artists - almost as a rule the daughters of big producers - who "get big" on Spotify, have about one year where anyone talks about them, and then disappear somewhere. Olivia Rodrigo is the biggest current one, I think. Billie Eilish has been the only one with any enduring popularity - she at least has a unique image even if her music is generic so that doesn't surprise me. There are dozens of others. Most of them have careers lasting age 18 to age 19.
This music resulting from this phenomenon was termed "Spotifycore" or "Streambait" as early as 2018 - https://thebaffler.com/downstream/streambait-pop-pelly - the big thing being that, to do well with Spotify's algorithms, it's good if your song is good and accrues likes & listens, but what matters most is not getting skipped. Getting skipped too much is a red card. This favors inoffensive "muzak" music, because anything inventive or original will probably irritate some people and accrue fatal skips even if it pleases most people more than generic stuff.
Another subtler factor at play here is that counting streaming plays in the charts has enabled career-buying in several much more direct ways than existed previously. You can pay Spotify directly to promote your song on their in-house playlists - a heck of a lot easier than paying disparate radio DJs across the country. You can pay popular brands like Nike to put your song in their Spotify playlists - "Who listens to a Nike playlist," you might be thinking. It turns out the answer is lots of people. You can also pay popular "playlist influencers" to put your song on their playlists. Lastly you can pay view farms to play your new song on repeat - since a free Spotify account is, uh, free, this costs next to nothing. In all of these situations, a generic & inoffensive song that can slot perfectly into any vaguely-edm, vaguely-chill playlist will outperform a unique song that might not be so universally playlistable.
Usually these novel promotional tactics are not utilized by the artists themselves but rather by their record label & agent & various henchmen thereof - as long as someone will foot the bill until the newly "discovered" artist is self-sustaining. If an artist doesn't get there within a year or so, they seem to get dropped like a rock. Artists in the Spotify genre could well be talented people but the algorithm has incentivized a uniform product.
Of course Billboard, iTunes, the Grammys, and all of those similar markers really don’t mean anything anymore. It should be noted that the Oliver Anthony song is also the top song on Spotify, which doesn’t really mean anything either; a huge Spotify hit does not necessarily equate actual, real-world success.
We don’t know if this Anthony thing will amount to anything, but it’s still a zeitgeist popular music moment that’s bigger than anything we’ve seen in ages. Beware those who ignore it.
I think there is something in the wind but I don't think it's more of this. I think there is a coming Great Realignment in which "brown people" - don't blame me, official progressive terminology - will make a break from the white liberal zeitgeist & coalesce with each other. This will be a "dangerous new conservatism" in the eyes of certain so-called progressives - it will be anti-genderist & anti-racialist - but it will probably be relatively more pro-education and pro-labor than contemporary mainstream conservatism. You could reasonably describe this as "Christian Democracy Plus," since it will align Catholic Latinos and disparate Christian groups of every ethnicity with Muslims, Hindus, and socially traditional Asians. (Who will each bring with them far more interesting & diverse music - like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXT0yK46RuA as an example. Heard at a local pizza place owned by an Egyptian Christian family).
But for this to happen, contemporary mainstream conservatism needs to die. It's too uncool and it's far too fat, sweaty, and white. Not that the New Thing won't include lots of white conservatives, but it'll be younger and cooler ones in the main. I'm personally scanning the horizon for a grungy, edgy young Latino artist with a skin & bones look, a cynical take on everything, and no fear of cancellation by white liberals. Every day I grow more certain that the path to the New Thing runs through some yet undiscovered Hispanic Kurt Cobain.
My whole point is that Taylor Swift becoming the sole attraction of the music industry, along with a sudden maelstrom of attention around an unknown kid playing a working class song points to the twin, and intertwined, failures of the music industry and the pundit class. I don't think we're in any way in for a trend of farmers with hit songs, but people do thirst for art they find more honest, or just more entertaining. Some conservative-coded movie hits in the multiplexes, as well as way off the beaten track indie horror hits like "Terrifier 2" doing big business likewise point towards a movie industry that's seemingly stopped caring about what people actually want.
I don't think the Oliver Anthony situation is necessarily a politically conservative coded one, as much as a paean to working class solidarity. Entertaining YouTube videographer Matt Orfalea, who briefly worked for the Bernie campaign because of a viral Bernie-supporting video, obviously noticed the same reactions, across political and racial lines, that I did on YouTube and made a nice video documenting it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSIgQNarGWs&pp=ygUMbWF0dCBvcmZhbGVh
I agree there's likely some sort of realignment in the air, but who knows if it's going anywhere. I listened to a few interviews with Sohrab Ahmari about his new book the last few days, and while Ahmari considers himself a conservative because of his social views, his economic ideas are to the left of almost everyone in the federal government, and even he admits that the realignment likely stalled because Republicans really just want to wage culture wars with Democrats. I'd argue that that's true, but the inverse is that Democrats mostly only define themselves by their hatred of Trump, his supporters, and even lefties and other heretics who don't agree with some of their more extreme conspiracies and civil liberties violations (although they seem to love the neoconservatives now, who have mostly bec0ome Democrats). Until people can focus on actual policy, nothing is changing.
As far as a new art for the people, I'd love to see it. My biggest gripe — and it's a massive one — with the Brooklyn Laptop Class is that they've mostly been the destroyers of art. Liberal/leftie institutions and cities had been the stewards of art and culture for generations, and the millennial/gen z types of a decent level of privilege and education — who got turned on to once-thriving underground art movements and cheap arty bohemian neighborhoods around the country via social media — infiltrated those scenes and neighborhoods en masse and degraded independent art, music and film until it was a mediocre celebration of themselves, while ultra-gentrifying affordable and arty parts of Brooklyn, Austin, Portland, LA, etc., to the point where almost no one could afford them. They were careless destroyers, and they've now turned towards old world cultural institutions and politics, and they're not doing any better with those.
With regard to your last paragraph, the bird's-eye view is generally correct, but the result we see is really a coalescing of numerous trends. As far as the general abrogation of "high culture" in the traditional sense by academics & other white respectables, it's important to consider that way, way more people now attend college than used to. This makes current & recent college attendees a far more socioeconomically & culturally diverse group than they would have been 50 years ago, which is certainly good in some ways, but it also means there is less of a shared background & cultural milieu. In other words, long gone are the days when you could just bust out talking about a work by Keats or Dickens in a college class and expect everyone to have read it or at least to know its general contours.
And I absolutely do not mean to imply that anyone is to blame more than white people for this phenomenon - if anything most ethnic minority groups seem a lot more interested in traditional high culture than the average white person is today - rather that it's a result of expanding college enrollment and declining primary education in "high culture" among white people. We've crossed a tipping point where such knowledge can now no longer be assumed for a white-collar or higher-ed audience.
So we have a lot of people who consider themselves educated and hip but who in fact have extremely shallow cultural educations. These people are not newspaper readers, they are not even New Yorker readers, they are not crossword-doers, they are not opera-goers, they do not play instruments, they are not jazz fans, they are not even into folk. Such people are attracted not to centers of "high-effort culture" but rather to centers of "effortless cool." They want to be *where* art is done, but they do not *do* art themselves, and neither do they *buy* art. Their walls are, rather, strung with fairy lights from Target. To them a "cafe scene" is a Starbucks filled with yuppies each scrolling alone.
This is also to some extent an inevitable result of the social media exposure you mentioned. Where once knowledge of "hip stuff" was transmitted person-to-person or via niche media, now it can be accessed en masse. Rather than "local scenes" in the arty areas of each city, we now have a global-scale effect, where everyone not just in the US but on the planet who wants to live in "the cool place" moves to Brooklyn if they can afford it (or their parents can).
Yet hipsters lived in Brooklyn in the 90s not just because it was cheap and arty. They lived there because it was close to Manhattan's cultural centers. They wanted to live somewhere cheap and still be able to access Manhattan culture - in fact they themselves were only pushed into Brooklyn when Greenwich Village got too pricey. The Brooklynities who've replaced them in pursuit of their coolness don't care about Manhattan high culture. They didn't move to Brooklyn to be near Manhattan, they moved to Brooklyn to be in Brooklyn.
It's a quite fundamental difference. It's still very possible to live somewhere affordable with good Manhattan access - Hudson & Essex counties in northern New Jersey have excellent Manhattan access while still being relatively very cheap - and these areas are rich with hipsters now, while current-Brooklyn-types are allergic to the grittiness and equally allergic to the "uncoolness" of a NJ address vs a NYC address, and don't actually care about Manhattan access.
So I think it's more that the people inhabiting these higher-ed & white-collar spaces are just not the same group of people they used to be. The college-attending demographic is now 30% of the population rather than the 3-5% it was a few short decades ago. The group is now just too large to effectively act as "stewards of culture" even if they still consider themselves to be such. What we see as the same group's "fallen" talent for creative output and taste curation is actually a result of its broadening and dilution, and the resulting lowering of its standards has happened simply due to a lowest-common-denominator mechanism. The 3% still exist but they've been drowned out or shouted off their former pedestal by these less-culturally-educated newcomers (who are, again, just as white if not whiter than the original 3%). .
If you want to find a group actually interested in high culture, you should look for people actually exposed to elements of high culture in their education. This is, today, far more true of Asian people than white people, as one example. If you're looking for someone who would recognize Brahms by ear but not Swift, you'll have much more success looking among Asian New Jerseyans with degrees in CS working in tech fields than you would looking among white Brooklynites with degrees in art history working in marketing. The white Brooklynites *consider* themselves arty, and the Asian New Jerseyans *consider* themselves merely urban professionals, but their actual interests paint a rather opposite picture.
Well said, Ross. This has been my No. 1 issue with the social justice left over the years: they politicize the living shit out of every piece of art. Just like the old Moral Majority once did.
I've fallen out of love with movies lately because of how uber-politicized everything has become. I'm just so, so tired.
I actually really don't know if this song goes viral if its anti-Trump. And I've been thinking about the left-wing version of this song for two days. Does American Idiot count? Gang of Four? I really don't think left-leaning political music that anyone takes seriously gets this cringey. I can't think of a song about Obamacare. Maybe I'm too out of the loop, but music this explicitly pointed seems to be a product of the right only, inmy estimation.
For Various Reasons I think it's genuinely difficult for the modern right to be artful while sticking to their message.
Can you give an example of the modern right being genuinely artful?
It’s rare but not impossible. There are some talented reactionary filmmakers like S. Craig Zahler. Used to be more but as the media industry professionalized the social politics of cultural creators tended to move left (but only in ways that don’t threaten their financial backers).
I'm not sure Zahler is even a conservative. I think because that Dallas Sonnier — who's certainly conservative — was producing his films, people assumed he was. When that really awful piece in Daily Beast came out that essentially took down all of those Sonnier-related ventures like Fangoria, Birth Movies Death, Rebeller, his production company, etc., the writer (horrible anti-journalist) Marlow Stern claimed Zahler was a conservative, but also radically misrepresented the themes and story of his Dragged Across Concrete movie — which I'm pretty sure he didn't actually watch — which lead me to not really trust anything in that article. (I actually already knew to never trust that writer. He's maybe the worst of all time.) After that piece, several other writers wrote contentious pieces about him, often trying to tie him to his characters, or producer Sonnier's politics, as if they demanded some fealty, or an apology from him. And Zahler mostly stayed coy about it.
I see Zahler around NYC, and while I don't know him, some of his behavior I've observed would lead me to believe he's a pretty bog-standard New York liberal. It's a shame that all that happened, because it doesn't appear that he's working, and he's become radioactive because of a lot of outright yellow journalism. He probably isn't interested in following Sonnier to Ben Shapiro's outlet, but if he can't get another movie made, who knows? It's a shame because I quite liked his movies — as did a lot of other people — which didn't seem in any way "reactionary," but more of a return to cathartic tough guy movies, but more ultra-violent than before.
Last week I watched The Santa Fe Trail, a 1940 Michael Curtiz film. The message from the film was that John Brown and other radicals were forcing us into a Civil War and the south should be left to settle its own affairs re: slavery. It's a beautifully made film with an amazing performance by Errol Flynn.
I would love to hear a single example of such a work of art that has been produced since WW2. Thus far I've got none!
No, which is sort of my point! 😂
Great column.
The social justice left have become the new church ladies. The 'Try that in a small town' and this new 'Rich Men of North Richmond' tune are songs I'll probably never hear. Am I the only one? That these two songs are Racist!! to the SJW crowd, while Sexxy Redd's "PoundTown" is anodyne and not worthy of discussion, or City Girls "Throat Baby" (who cares about that right?) doesn't qualify under the 'misogynist' label .... it's all so tiresome and clownish.
The outrage is silly and the politicalization of everything is an avalanche of low energy.
While you may not be a "hater" of Taylor Swift, your account of her music comes across as dismissive to the point of ignorance - particularly when you say "her music, sonically pleasing and produced by committee on a quasi-regular basis, comfortably thrums through drug stores and elevator banks". As far as I am aware (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_songs_by_Taylor_Swift), the overwhelming majority of Taylor Swift's songs are ones that she wrote either alone or with one close collaborator (most notably Liz Rose, Jack Antonoff, or Aaron Dessner). There are exceptions - (the rather atypical) Lavender Haze has no fewer than 5 co-writers, and the same is true of a handful of others. But those aren't the songs that have made her so beloved by so many people.
And yes, they are probably "sonically pleasing". A less dismissive way of making the same point would be to say that she has perhaps the most remarkable gift for creating memorably haunting melodies of any musician in any genre that I can remember encountering. And it is surely that, not her politics or her avoidance of politics, that has created her exceptional popularity among people of all political backgrounds.
I personally love her music. I know (and care) nothing about her political ideas, and I certainly don't particularly expect her to share mine. I admire her for her musical genius, not her right-thinking (or otherwise). Trying to explain her popularity by ascribing a political slot to her is really to miss the point in a massive way. And I don't think that the fact that Emily Ratajkowski (someone I'd never heard of) missed the point in the opposite direction is any excuse.
Blank Space is maybe my favorite - it has 3 songwriting credits. She has such a huge catalog that there's plenty you can point to that supports your point, but I can find a large number of hits that were produced with a collaborator or larger team.
I don't ascribe her popularity to her politics. I'm simply saying she's been savvy (or cynical) enough to not alienate anyone. She's not one of the Dixie Chicks.
There was a time, years and ages ago, when writing a song with a "close collaborator" meant you wrote it with a bandmate, a friend, a lover, or someone else you had a personal relationship with - someone who you were, in other words, "close" to. That you use "close collaborator" to mean "paid professional songwriting assistance" without a hint of irony is a frightful sign of our times.
The resulting songs have certainly been the most catchy from a pop star since Carly Rae Jepsen's brief time in the mainstream - You Belong With Me, Bad Blood & Blank Space were undeniable earworms. Taylor Swift is also a powerful performer with impressive physical presence & self-evident charisma. The brand "Swift," like "Disney," is very much a corporate creation, but that doesn't diminish Swift songs any more than it diminishes Disney movies, and Taylor has had a stronger guiding hand than almost any other artist in the creation of her corporate self.
She's very evidently an exceedingly sharp person of business, and her ability in that arena has been key to her success to a vastly larger extent than her personal songwriting ability. If she hadn't had the performing talent & the looks to make a star of herself personally, she would probably be no less successful making stars of other people. Trying to say that such an exceptionally effective businesswomen's *real* strength is in songwriting is actually rather diminishing, to be honest.
I certainly did not intend to deny Taylor Swift's superlative business acumen, or to suggest that it does not play a major part in her success! But I don't think it would count for much without the songs to back it up - and she has had a far greater hand in the creation of most of those songs (including some great songs she wrote entirely alone) than Ross implied in his original post.
But I was more intrigued by the comment that you made at the start:
"There was a time, years and ages ago, when writing a song with a "close collaborator" meant you wrote it with a bandmate, a friend, a lover, or someone else you had a personal relationship with - someone who you were, in other words, "close" to. That you use "close collaborator" to mean "paid professional songwriting assistance" without a hint of irony is a frightful sign of our times."
I'm not sure exactly when that "time, years and years ago" was, but it wasn't the prewar period, when Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers were close collaborators on a commercial basis without being personal friends. Nor in the WW1 era, when the same was true of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannstahl. Nor in the 19th century, when the same was true of W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. Nor in the late 18th century, when the same was true of W.A. Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte. I don't know much about 17th century music or earlier - maybe you're referring to then :)?
It's true that in those earlier generations there was a stricter division of artistic labor: one person typically wrote the words, the other the music. But since the resulting works are a combination of music and words, I can't see why that should make a difference. And the nature of those remarkable partnerships was truly collaborative, as you can see if you read their surviving correspondence; the composer would make suggestions about the words, the lyricist would make suggestions about the music, and they would adapt and try new things out. How is that materially different from Taylor Swift and (e.g.) Jack Antonoff?
>I certainly did not intend to deny Taylor Swift's superlative business acumen, or to suggest that it does not play a major part in her success! But I don't think it would count for much without the songs to back it up
But...no, that's...that's exactly what you're doing, right there. She absolutely would be successful even if she didn't write a single word of her own songs. Her "true" level of songwriting ability - which is in fact unknowable - has a negligible bearing on her success, outside of her ability to take a higher cut of the proceeds of Swift Inc by filling multiple roles personally. Many pop queens never wrote a word, so pop stardom is plainly not contingent on songwriting ability.
Asserting that Swift's success is in any way contingent on her songwriting ability is in fact diminishing her abilities in these other arenas, which would almost certainly have carried her to pop success regardless. She doesn't just have "business acumen," she has more business acumen than almost anyone else on the planet, and certainly more than almost anyone else in the music industry. Her move outside of the country music environment was entirely self-precipitated and was opposed by basically every music industry person she worked with at the time, as one example.
The material difference you're looking for is that established songwriting teams with a history of mutual collaboration are quite a different thing from Jack Antonoff writing songs for Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, and just about everyone in between. Antonoff's personal fortunes are not even slightly tied to any one partner in rhyme and he's not particularly "close" to any one of his clients more than others, so far as we know . Wouldn't be good business for Antonoff Inc to let such a thing out anyway even if it were true. Anyway, you're essentially comparing married couples to polygamists and calling them equal because they both have sex.
"Her "true" level of songwriting ability - which is in fact unknowable"
This is an utterly bizarre comment. As I've repeatedly pointed out, Taylor Swift has written a good number of songs by herself, and they include some of her most famous and popular works - "Dear John", for example, or "Mean", or "Love Story". My own view is that those alone are enough to prove her a masterly songwriter. You may disagree - maybe you dislike those and the other songs she wrote by herself, and feel that they show her a poor writer. But love them or hate them, they give us plenty of evidence for her abilities one way or the other.
"The material difference you're looking for is that established songwriting teams with a history of mutual collaboration are quite a different thing from Jack Antonoff writing songs for Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, and just about everyone in between ... Anyway, you're essentially comparing married couples to polygamists and calling them equal because they both have sex."
[Sound of hairs being split finer and finer] Your original claim was that calling a paid partner like Antonoff a "close collaborator" was something new, because it used to require (in your words) a "personal relationship". Now you accept that a pair of people with no personal relationships at all can be "close collaborators" if they are "established songwriting teams with a history of mutual collaboration", and you claim that Swift and Antonoff are different from that.
But (in your terms), Mozart and Da Ponte were themselves "polygamists" - both of them worked far more with other people than they did with each other. Swift and Antonoff have a much more consistent long-term relationship than they did. The same is true of various other famous close collaborators, like Giuseppe Verdi and Francesco Maria Piave. There is really nothing new about Swift and Antonoff doing the same thing.
A songwriting credit is a contract item that determines how future royalties from a song will be divided. It is not inherently an accurate description of the process behind a song's creation. Song-wrights less famous than Antonoff often take a lump-sum payment for their services in lieu of future royalties and forego a songwriting credit for their contributions. Record labels likewise often have song-wrights on retainer who likewise don't get credited as songwriters on individual songs. As a result, any popular artist's "true" level of songwriting ability is in fact unknowable.
Antonoff is very plainly a preeminent consultant in the music-making industry who works for the highest bidder. Even if Swift has been a very high bidder for quite some time, it's not sensible to compare that to a collaborative process between peers. Your original claim was in fact that Swift 'closely collaborates' with numerous people in addition to Antonoff - numerous people who also happen to be veteran music industry song-wrights. These interactions could be collaborative or they could be strictly transactional - who's to say Taylor doesn't buy an Antonoff song and then tell him to get lost while she tailors it to her liking? - but that would be, again, an unknowable.
Swift is an excellently sharp businessperson & brand manager and it's just odd that you have a need to assert a certainty on these unknowables in addition to that..
I think it was She Hulk where this phenomenon really went over the top for me. I remember that show getting all sorts of praise and of course that praise centered its feminist message.
And then I watched She Hulk and it was... not good at all. "Men, Amirite" Tatiana Maslany offered to the camera as she rolled her eyes. "Mansplaining is the worst." This was a feminist message delivered with a sledgehammer. The show wasn't wearing its politics on its sleeve, it had pasted them onto the business end of a hammer and was bludgeoning me with it.
Despite that: endless praise! It was mystifying to me.
Having the right (for whatever definition of right you care to assume) politics isn't a substitute for artfulness, and yet that's the turn our culture has taken. That's not to say that Taylor Swift isn't artful; I have no idea. She's got some catchy tunes, mostly unobjectionable, but it's not my style so I don't much listen to her. But as you say, I certainly should be able to have that opinion without it like being some commentary on where I stand in our political culture wars.
Taylor Swift is a Heather.
I still think quality matters at the margins. Just as absurd as it is to say what Ratajkowski said would be to say Swift has no talent. There is a quality one must meet to become this level of superstar. But the era where taste mattered seems to be dying out. I don’t know if there are any “hipsters” anymore in the era of high rent, but I haven’t seen anyone explicitly hate on swift for being popular. Maybe this is the logical terminus on the long 180 degree tunnel from the gen X “sell out” period. There is no authenticity. There is no fake. There’s just a screen, a person, and sound.
>the era of high rent
is not universal. Hipsters are now to be found not in Brooklyn but in Nashville & New Jersey. Nashville I've only heard about, but I can tell you firsthand there are tons in NJ. I can just walk around and count the moustaches.
Where I am in NJ, I could walk into the Chipotle down the block and walk out with a $14.50/hr job covering my half of the rent and then some, no college degree needed. The Walmart ten minutes away is advertising $20/hr for full-time stockers. If there were four hipsters sharing my present digs - perfectly doable - and they all had day jobs as Walmart stockers, they'd each be earning $3200 a month pretax, on rent & utils of about $700 per month apiece - and they'd be 45 minutes on the PATH & subway from the Bowery Ballroom. That right there is math that attracts hipsters like flies to beer.
Sniffing the wind personally, my predictions for the next few years are Latin grunge, Asian emo, and Desi Girl Summer.
I think part of this is that poptimism has (more or less) fully conquered criticism. Freddie DeBoer has written quite a bit about it, for example: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/pitchfork-and-the-death-of-things
Part of what isn’t discussed here enough is that the cultural gatekeepers for far too long were rockist white guys. Country and hip hop sales had overtaken rock sales by early 90s but you wouldn’t have known that by the coverage of music. So a lot of “poptimism” issue is just an over correction for decades of delayed cultural ascendancy for artists who were often non white, non rock, non men etc.
Oh yeah, I don't at all disagree that the previous consensus was an equally narrow form of hegemony.