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There is a certain kind of young man who finds Taylor swift incredibly annoying. I’m not certain why, exactly- she seems not appreciably more annoying than other pop stars of similar ilk, at least- but it is a thing. And both of these involved young men.
Same reason people hated on Twilight and most boy bands and hell, things like Transformers for that matter.
Some people just like to hate on the popular thing and some tend to find enthusiastic teenage girl squeeing particularly annoying.
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She’s more or less a hack. Her music is generic pop with lyrics that say nothing interesting. It’s what I would imagine would come out the other end if I asked AI to write a breakup song. Her dancing isn’t anything spectacular either. To me she’s sort of corporate pop music that I don’t like. I want music that has something to say, I want music that’s interesting in some way.
I'll die on the hill that Red is actually just a great album. All Too Well (the original, not the far-too-indulgent 10 minute remix from later) remains a very good song, probably the best she's made.
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I think there's an element of old high-school social dynamics that she brings to the 'adult' world,
She's the popular girl with who is mildly talented but is also pretty and somewhat charismatic. And so the mere fact of her being popular means all the girls like her (or wish they could be her) and thus she can do no wrong even if her behavior is actually toxic in many ways.
Guys who didn't function well in the high school social environment probably have a reflexive dislike to seeing this dynamic recreated. I know I feel a bit of that when I hear about her dating the Football star who could have any girl he wants.
(I don't hold this theory strongly as I try not to have strong opinions on Taylor Swift)
Ah, so you're saying she's cheer captain and you're on the bleachers?
I kid. But there is this feeling I get from Swift where she's a massively popular and famous artist, but tailors (heh) her music to this sort of disaffected, underdog-feeling woman who's actually, if she could evaluate her life honestly, doing just fine in the world. It's the constant insecurity-feeding of it I don't like.
And it's that she's the most famous female singer in the world who sings normie songs about normie problems, but releases albums with titles like "The Tortured Poets Department" like she's some sort of radical high artist crafting poetry from Reading Gaol.
I still don't get the "not like other girls" meme, but insofar as I get it, it's that there's a huge cadre of young women who think they're different and creative and original and unique, but are actually just extremely conventional in an environment where bohemianism is conventional (and may God save us). That's what annoys me about Taylor Swift.
My girlfriend is one of the only women I know who doesn't like Taylor Swift -- but I think in part that's because she likes real country, and sees Swift as one of the pop-country sellouts who helped destroy country music. The coal miner's daughter can sing about being the underdog, the pretty girl born of stockbrokers can keep her fantasies of being downtrodden to herself.
I hate to defend someone who needs no defending but that title is purely ironic if you listen to the lyrics. It's about not being some tortured poet but a modern idiot.
Well see there's the issue. I won't listen to the lyrics, so any irony is quite literally lost on me.
But I'll take your word for it.
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Pop country had already destroyed "real" country music either 10 years ago, 20 years ago, or hell, 30 years ago depending on what generation you are. Unless your girlfriend's into some real obscure alt-country honkytonk sort of stuff, whatever she considered real country that might've been playing on the radio in 1995, 2003, or whenever she was younger was considered as 'ruining' country music by the next generation up.
I'm old enough to remember Garth Brooks being seen as the Taylor Swift of his time by country music fans.
That’s fair, I’m not particularly knowledgeable about the discourse surrounding country music and I was just speculating why she might not like Taylor Swift. When she sends me music she likes it’s usually… well, “honkytonk alt-country” probably isn’t the right word, but there are a lot of old hymns, though I think she enjoyed 90s country even if she thinks more classic folk music is better. I think the point for her is music that actually engaged with the problems faced by rural people, not stuff that tries to appeal to an urban (and by this I don’t mean ‘black’) audience or is just degenerate stuff about fucking a truck with a bottle of Coors Lite. On Swift, all she’s actually said is that she doesn’t like her.
Your comment made me curious though, so I asked her. She said she really doesn’t like her music, to the point where she would turn the radio dial if one of her songs came on. She said she’s found a lot of women will ask her if she likes Taylor Swift as an icebreaker, but she has no clue what interests them. So who knows.
She is also the most emotionally and interpersonally-stable person I’ve ever dated, so… I guess people can make of that what they will. But keep in mind this is someone whose favorite directors are Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese. She’s weird. I love her so much.
I'd actually probably agree with her on which sort of country music is better, but unfortunately, the market has spoken on this.
While it's probably just semantics, I'd also wouldn't say the shift is so much to going after an urban audience, but rather a more upscale exurban/suburban audience - instead of the more downscale working class audience (which has drifted to rap/hip-hop no matter their race), modern country music is aimed the type of guy who can buy the fully kitted out Ford F150 to drive to his car dealership job and maybe out to a lake cabin he rented, but never actually hauls anything or the woman who posts on Instagram about Jesus, but also had a fun time at college and so on. But in some ways, it's just the inevitable end of the fall of rock music (as there's lots of big songwriters in Nashville today that used to work in Los Angeles in the 80's) + the southernization of all of rural/exurban America, which made the culture of country music more available, but also flatter.
For all the talk of safety in art, the 'safest' genre as far as being afraid to offend anybody is absolutely modern country music.
It's fine to not like her, but Taylor Swift was not the first of her type, she was just the most successful by a giant margin.
Eh, there's plenty of poor/working class whites who like country music, either pop country or 'red dirt'(or more commonly, a mix thereof), although alty stuff is mostly for the $12/beer at live music venues crowd. Pop country sells better because teenaged girls fantasizing about dating a cowboy will spend more money than construction workers feeding their work radio.
Like, John Baumann and Uncle Lucius have 0% appeal outside of the 'excuse me, I work for a living' crowd. Really successful artists can usually crossover their appeal somehow, because plumbers and builders and the like will not spend money on music they don't have to.
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Jesus, that is a Swift song, isn't it.
But yeah, she sells songs about emotional turmoil resulting from, bluntly, questionable decisions in life from the position of somebody who has never had to actually suffer any real traumas that I know of. This doesn't invalidate her art, but you do wonder how a normal person actually identifies with her.
I admit I like the music video, but the Song about a toxic falling-out with an old friend seems like one of the most female-coded passive aggressive screeds with the least constructive message imaginable. "Some unstated bad thing has occurred, and now we are sworn enemies for life, also I hate you."
EDIT: Wait, I forgot that she surpassed that one a couple years later, with an even MORE passive-aggressive screed with even LESS clear motivation.
Compare that to, say N'Sync's classic Bye Bye Bye (also a neat music video) which is also about the termination of an established relationship which it carries with it pangs of regret but stating a clear determination to end things because it is necessary for one's own well-being, and desiring to make it as clean a break as possible. Undertones of desire for vengeance and bubbling spite are nowhere to be found.
I'm laughing because I was driving home from work this week thinking about how "The Tortured Poets Department" sounds like it would be some high-concept, lyrically complex compilation of musical artists digging deep into their soul to perform their most profound songs with serious emotional weight.
But from what I gather, its a collection of the most privileged-white-girl laments possible set to basic guitar and piano melodies. And even the fans have it rated as her worst album overall.
Just to repeat another comment though, this is an ironically titled album and a clearly ironic lyric when read/heard in context.
The lyric (and the song specifically) is semi-ironic. There is something self-effacing about it, but it’s more of a mockery of her ex than it is her laughing at herself. ‘Look at the ridiculous characters you made us into’ is the message, it’s a diss track more than anything else.
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Sounds like a good description of many of those who can afford a ticket to her concerts, honestly.
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Taylor Swift is basically the queen of white girls, so frustrations towards white girls get channeled into her.
I think it’s the herd mentality that’s annoying. She is popular to woman A because women B and C like her.
I remember the sane thing was true with Beyoncé about a decade ago.
She’s is to white women what The Beatles are to redditors/college freshmen men.
Wow poetry.
Ironic to mention the Beatles given how Beatlemania was driven by young white women too
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Not a Beatles song though
It is however a Beatle song.
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She's a typically annoying Democrat lipstick feminist and pretty much a grifter with rather effective cash-grabbing methods. I'd say her huge popularity among single women of her age (mostly) largely stems from her singing about a lived experience they can strongly relate to, namely serial monogamy, which I'd define as promiscuity as preferred by women (as opposed to harem-building and plate-spinning, which is promiscuity as preferred by men). This surely makes her annoying to many young men.
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In Islam and Hasidim, women can’t sing in public to others. This to me is the real misogyny. Misogyny isn’t telling women to fulfill their biological duty, misogyny is restricting them from fulfilling it. Singing is a biological duty, it is social and sexual expression. This could have something to do with the attacks as an Ariana Grande concert was also targeted.
Exactly.
The thing about Islam is that it's a religion from a place that has basically zero natural resources; it's starting from a condition of overpopulation and permanent, complete dependence on resource-gatherers (i.e. men) with very little to invest in industry or other secondary development (men extract, women refine, but refining can't happen without extraction, they have no way to increase extraction, and are barely extracting enough as-is).
Thus women in that religion remain a mere resource to be managed and controlled; time and resources spent on their desires and flourishing is in that context a deadweight loss. And because this has been the default state for all but the most recent ~15 generations of humankind (for Europeans and their Consequential Industrial Revolutions, less than that or even 0 for other parts of the world), this default state is baked into male biology and requires some effort to overcome (and note that it's only "misogyny" if the surrounding society is advanced enough to make running on pure biology maladaptive; everywhere else just calls that "normal gender relations").
Religions that have their genesis in lands of material plenty without relative overpopulation tend to be able to cope with women able to act as men through technological advancement much better. Islam succeeds when areas become more populated and less technologically advanced, which is probably why the European elite (who uniquely have technological devolution as a core tenet of their own religion- their desire to murder their fellow citizens and otherwise degrade their standard of living is universal) get along with them so easily.
Until the industrial revolution everyone in the long run was either (1) in a Malthusian trap, (2) had a lot of war, or (3) had a lot of disease. Before sustained economic growth and birth control, something bad was always the check on population growth.
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But the same is true of almost all other cultures. Even China had pretty strong control over women (look up foot binding) and most of the rest of us have long since ditched those controls. Some of the results are obviously good — women can contribute to earning money for the household, they can make and sell art, and aren’t restricted in communication with the rest of society. And some are quite obviously bad— children essentially raised as daycare orphans, single mothers, the denigration of the military as it must loosen necessary requirements to accommodate women who aren’t and cannot meet the standards, the growth of welfare state benefits out of proportion to the growth of the tax revenue collected, safetyism.
I thought foot binding was a largely upper-class phenomenon as a result of a Versailles-esque status-game gone bonkers, which then spread among the general population?
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I followed you up until the point you lost me. Islam as a religion-as-meme uniquely suited to areas with low resources makes intuitive sense to me.
However, the meme might break down a bit once you look at the oil-producing gulf states awash in plenty. Maybe their inclinations towards religious extremism is toned down by the generous state handouts.
And finally, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to call the European elite technological devolutionists, but saying they have a desire to murder their fellow citizens and otherwise degrade their standard of living is probably pushing it. I think it's altogether more insidious; it's vibes. They are bound to a vision of technological devolution because they're attracted to a future where they can recreate classical paintings of bountiful farmlands of plenty, vs the banlieues and urban hellholes of depreciated industry, it's an aesthetic and a fad. They'll loop back to something else just as insane in a few decades. They don't want to murder their fellow citizens, they don't even think of them as fellow citizens. I fall on the side of believing their misery happens entirely as a side effect of the European elite's quest for vibes, not out of any active desire to see them suffer. The elephant doesn't consider the ants it crushes.
The Gulf states not being awash in oil money is still in living memory in those places- they have liberalized a bit, but they're going to need more time. Countries that did technically speedrun those changes (thinking mostly of the Asian ones) still took a hundred-ish years to see major changes and their culture didn't start in the desert.
But they still do want to murder them, proof upthread. Also, that's pretty funny, considering the elites' entire problem with the riots is that the natives pretty clearly don't see the new imports as "fellow citizens". But then again, citizenship is for subjects.
Enh, he was a former councilor and he was arrested. A proper elite wouldn't have been arrested. This is a clown playing to his audience misreading the audience a bit. If this man was anywhere close to elite, he would have actually murdered his fellow citizens if the urge struck, and gotten away with it.
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I think it's because she seems to have her own gravitational pull that swallows everything in her immediate surroundings. There was a minor controversy this year in the US where it seemed like there was more more interest in her dating Travis Kelce than anything related to the Super Bowl. And it has whiffs of the ongoing 'female encroachment into male hobbies/interests' dispute.
I don't watch sports generally and have little interest in the Bowls, so I don't know how much there is to that. But it kinda appeared that way to me looking at passing headlines around that time.
There is also a very obnoxious subset of her fanbase that can't seem to stop gushing over her and will heatedly defend her honor at the mere suggestion that she's overexposed, and this includes women in their 30s and 40s. But eh... fanbases are fanbases.
Personally, I just don't see the talent matching the success. I think artists like Lady Gaga and Madonna in her prime had more to them, where I could understand their popularity. Swift is a big gray zone in my mind where I can only recall 'Shake it Off'? But at my age and level of disconnect from Pop music generally, that take might as well hold as much weight as my deceased grandfather's.
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Yes, young men. You might even call them “youths”. But I suspect there’s considerable variability in the amount of annoyance perceived by this broad demographic
Yes, there is a variance, but there’s plenty of young white men who find her annoying too.
Again, the median male opinion on Taylor swift is ‘generic female pop star with bigger tits than talent #5000’. But there are some who find her incredibly irritating and hate on her. Not surprised that young men intending to commit mass violence for whatever reason has an overrepresentation of this group.
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Youths means all young men of every skin color so that you think of white chavs whenever the media reports on the poor behavior of them. When the whites do bad things the media will aggressively call them right wing whites, so as to protect the precious brown migrants from every bad thing. I am 100% certain the plastering of Ricky Jones name everywhere is because that name sounds ostensibly white so the media gets to continue pretending their precious browns are not actually doing anything wrong.
Like the US, the UK has plenty of black people of ADOS descent (atm machine etc), in this case from the Caribbean, who have names of the ‘John Smith’ variety.
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As a small counterexample, that name feels similar enough to "Mickey Smith" that it makes me picture Noel Clarke.
And his alternate universe name was Ricky.
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Topically enough, five years ago I wrote a post on Taylor Swift's Awokening in the Culture War thread. I think it was one of the last AAQCs I got before becoming a moderator.
Truth be told, I still enjoy most of her music.
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