a grammar

another overview of recent Taylor Swift debate

I don’t really have all that much to say about Taylor Swift. Various other people on the internet do. (If you are one of them, you can save your time; you already know everything in this post.) Hopefully those people won’t mind if I categorize and paraphrase them a little! Here are three potential camps, among many:

There are people who feel like Swift’s work and image celebrate a vision of young women and girls as being, ideally, pure and virginal and docile, and that this is, for obvious reasons, annoying and bullshit.
Others think that the above complaint is just a terrible and superficial misreading of Swift and the actual content of her work, which is way more complex and interesting than that, is quite often offering the exact opposite of that message, and contains resonant emotional stuff about being a young woman that the above complainers would probably respect and cheer for, if they bothered actually engaging with what Swift’s saying instead of just going off on it.
And still others take various mid-ground positions. Abby McDonald just outlined one I find particularly sensible (on Twitter, no less, though you can read it in paragraph form here). What I’m getting from her is the suggestion that Swift, like a lot of young women, actually does contain and inhabit a lot of these ideas about femininity and purity, but her music describes living with those ideas in a way that’s sophisticated and authentic and thinks hard about what that’s like. And so, even leaving alone the way it’s surely valid for those people to hear their experience described, well — in terms of being a role model, maybe she’s doing a good job of communicating with girls in that position, describing it in a way that can help them understand its dimensions and begin to question their values. (Which might mean she’s doing more to undermine those values than anyone criticizing her.)

Camp #1 has provoked a lot of great discussion in the past, which you can find lots of places on the internet. Tumblr-wise, there was plenty of Camp #1 in this recent post from sexistculture. Which bothered a good advocate of Camp #2 — Jonathan at screwrocknroll, who’s written well and often about how a lot of criticisms of Swift seem based on cursory misreadings of a song or two, and don’t square at all with her actual recordings or lyrics. Then there was a bunch of discussion on Twitter, which I don’t use, so I missed it. And then Jonathan’s post, in turn, bothered sadydoyle, who can think of a whole bunch of things about Swift that support the anti-Swift thesis, and also wonders why the people in Camp #2 are “usually dudes.”

Which, with much love to Sady, might be a little off. For one thing, I would imagine there’s a huge silent majority of Camp #2 believers who are, you know, Swift’s fans, many of them young girls. For another, there’s a slightly more specific tool we could use to describe how things break down. And that would be to point out that, as far as upper-middlebrow internet discussions go, people whose primary interest is not music are well-represented in Camp #1, and people whose primary interest is music are well-represented in Camp #2.

In other words I would suggest that sometimes this is just a turf war.

Somewhere in that Twitter discussion, Tom Ewing suggested the issue is really about Swift’s content/product versus her brand — if you look at the image that’s being marketed around her, the criticisms are valid, whereas if you listen to what she’s actually writing and singing, they might not. And, well …

Well: read Jonathan’s post and then Sady’s post. You’ll see this distinction precisely. Jonathan talks about the detail of Swift’s content, the things the songs mean if you actually care about them and hear them in the context of caring about Swift’s music. Sady talks about Swift as a cultural phenomenon and a business concern, talking about her wardrobe, her look, the plots of her videos, her choice of movie roles, the air of wholesome-idealized-sweet-loyal-princess that’s developed around her. Neither of these is necessarily a “better” thing to talk about, or the “wrong” thing to talk about! But they’re obviously incredibly different things, and it’s hard not to point out that one of them consists of things Taylor Swift actually does (like writing lyrics and singing songs) and the other consists in large part of other people’s decisions and perceptions. A lot of the most pointed criticisms of Swift go out of their way to ignore Swift’s own voice, which is a little weird.

And what always makes me see this as a turf war is some kind of tension in there between people who talk about culture and people who care a little more intensely about the music world in particular. Jonathan, for instance, can be pretty strident and snippy in his defenses of Swift (which is fun to read), and part of the tone of them always seems to be: “Please actually pay attention to the thing you are talking about.” Alex Macpherson, a critic who’s great on pop, draws that line more explicitly:

Journalists have been doing this forever, where “forever” = as long as I’ve been reading newspapers, and where “this” always used to = thinkpieces about What Britney Spears Tells Us About ~Society~ (insert Lohan or Gaga or whoever now). … [T]he quality usually hinges on…wait for it…the accuracy with which they cover the artist’s actual material, and the interaction between the material and the image.

In this instance, what’s interesting is that no one’s really talked about What Taylor Swift Tells Us About Society yet, because every criticism I’ve read has pretended to focus on the substance: conflating video with song, taking lines out of context and basing arguments on them. I haven’t yet seen any of those critics respond to the defences of Swift, though, and I’d rather not second-guess their motives or ascribe deeper reasons to them without it coming from their mouths. … This debate could use a lot more specificity before it gets to go broad, really.

Meanwhile I get the sense there’s a similar feeling running the other way — do Camp #1 critics of Swift ever feel like they’re talking about something more important than the fine details of pop music? I don’t know. But Lex’s call for specificity there would be a good way out of the turf war, right? Or at least an interesting way out. Probably one that would lead to people understanding one another better.

(UPDATE: More super-awesome primary-source material can be found here.)