Taylor Swift is Exceptional

Reflections on the relative quality of popular music

Q.“If you were not a singer, what would you be doing?”

A.“I might be an advertiser. Maybe like coming up with slogans and concepts is the same as coming up with hooks in songs.”

Taylor Swift destroys herself in the above interview answer. She reveals her view that music is fundamentally the same as advertising. Most artists would recoil in horror if anyone alleged this about them. Some artists like Andy Warhol would make an edgy ‘bit’ out of being a soulless businessperson. But Andy Warhol was hamming it up, making it shocking. He professed his love of commerce with a self-consciously weird incantation: “business art business”, he would say.

To me, the fact that Swift admits to being an advertiser implicitly, not as a statement of identity, proves that she really really is just an advertiser.

On that theme, I have been an absolute trooper, dear reader, and listened to some Taylor Swift. I would say ‘so you don’t have to’, but I appear to be missing the memo and everyone else has already gone through the back catalogue 36 times. Anyway, I can report back that the music is truly boring. If I listen to most contemporary pop music, I can normally find a surprising amount of interest. The interest comes from clever music production, if not from lyrics or a sense of overwhelming authenticity.

The production for WAP, for example, is sparse in the extreme. It’s based on a chromatic baseline which does nothing but go up two semitones and it’s syncopated. It’s weirdly effective, because it’s ‘naked’ in music technology terms, bare, shocking, swaggering, etc. I have tried to look up “WAP Sheet music” on Google and found some interesting results. Amazingly, few of the charts actually get the rhythm right. They tend to just assume the bassline is just pairs of half notes going up and down again—completely wrong! A bassist on the Guitar and Bass Covers YouTube channel has attempted a version of the track, but it’s wrong because the melody goes up a semitone twice, not once. Clearly, the musicality of WAP has been sorely underestimated.

The production for Anti Hero, by Taylor Swift, has a few more tracks in the mix. However, they are all utterly pants. There is a riffing synth which I think might be a Garageband preset. Swift’s vocals are swimming in so much reverb, so we already know what the song will sound like when it’s pumped into motorway service station toilets. It feels desperate. Because the overall sonic effect is so thin, the producers have tried to give it a sense of body by using the most basic trick in the book.

Both WAP and Anti Hero have big lists of personnel associated with them. The production is not done, or at least not mainly done, by the starring singers. But if the starring singers get the credit, they should get the blame too. The entity that “Taylor Swift” represents has failed to hire good musical talent, and it’s failed to create interesting collaborations.

Then we have the car crash of ME!’s chorus, complete with MIDI horns and quarter note high octave piano chords. Oh my God! Then we have the lumbering major baseline of You Need to Calm Down. Oh my GOD!

The sum product of this is that Taylor Swift’s music has no discernible qualities. It really lacks predicates. This is exceptional.

Other than just dragging Taylor Swift, which is I admit quite boring and mean, there is an interesting lesson here. People like to think of popular music as coming in phases. The phases usually go like “whatever was being played during my teenage years = good; everything else = bad.” Some, though, will say that the ‘70s or the ‘90s or the ‘10s were great periods for music, even if they didn’t ‘belong’ to those decades.

My view, from comparing something like WAP and Anti Hero is that popular music continues to be, and always has been, the wild west. Quality varies hugely. It does not come in waves of good or bad. Popular music is like a petri dish left out in the open. Whatever multiplies and succeeds, multiplies and succeeds, but there is a great deal of diversity. Some of the musical ideas will be long lived, and stand the test of time. Other ideas which rely on gimmicks get old quickly. Because it’s all popular by definition, it’s easy to get lost and confused when trying to compare levels of quality. The comparison of quality—the distinction between excellent and naff—is there: it just takes some critical listening to figure out what’s good and what isn’t.