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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   21217 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

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Sorry, when referring to Taylor Swift as a teenybopper I meant that her music's primary target demographic is and always has been teenage girls, not that she herself is a teenager.

This is obviously false, though. Her primary target demographic, throughout her career, has been, “people of roughly the same age as Taylor Swift.” As she has aged, her fanbase has aged along with her, and her lyrical subject matter has evolved concurrently. Yes, many girls who are currently teenage are into Taylor Swift, but she doesn’t have the cachet among that demographic that she did 10 years ago, and the majority of people at her shows are millennials, none of whom are currently teenaged.

That's fair. I guess from a compositional standpoint, what little of her music I'm familiar with screams "pop for teenaged girls" for me, even the more recent stuff, even if the lyrical content is more mature than one would expect of pop for teenaged girls.

People’s comfort music is usually reminiscent of what they listened to as teens. Not sure why they’re so over the top about it, but the preference is unsurprising.

I’m not hugely into following pop stars, but aren’t her most popular songs from earlier in her career when she acted like a teenager because, well, she was one.

Not at all. Her commercial peak began in her mid- to late-20s and has persisted well into her 30s.

Of course, but even her more recent singles (like "Anti-Hero") sound, from a compositional perspective, largely indistinguishable from singles released by the current generation of teen or early twenties pop stars, whose target demographic is teenage girls.

I mean you basically just admitted you haven’t listened to very much of her music, so why should anyone take seriously your opinions regarding its composition qualities?

Last year I was curious if there was anything to this whole "academic analysis of Taylor Swift's music" thing, so I listened to the song which, to my understanding, is universally considered to be her crowning achievement: "All Too Well". It sounded like a Sixpence None the Richer cut that didn't make the album, and the lyrics were decidedly adolescent, even juvenile. If that's the best she can do (according to all the music critics and academics who have built up a cottage industry around obsessively analysing her music and lyrics), I see little reason to dig any deeper. If there are songs in her discography which are more impressive from a compositional or lyrical perspective, I'll give them a go, but I honestly don't expect to be impressed.

I'll grant that some of the singles are catchy if forgettable.

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