“Bullets can’t stop it! Rockets can’t stop it! We may have to use nuclear force!” – Frank Zappa, Cheepnis
“We are never, ever getting back together!” – Taylor Swift
When Taylor Swift dropped the video for “Shake It Off” earlier this year, she set off discussion and thinkpieces about her new image, sound and look. She’d shed any pretence of being a country superstar and embraced pop more or less wholesale.
As I argued a long time ago here, Swift had been headed in this direction anyway. Not only was she arguably the most popular country star in North America, but to most people she was just a music star, regardless of genre. It’s Swift, not Kacey Musgraves, who pops up in the supermarket tabloids and it’s not because “Follow Your Arrow” is somehow less country than “Teardrops On My Guitar.” It’s because Swift’s a monster-sized success, while Musgraves is only now making waves in Nashville.
And like all monsters, Taylor Swift’s headed to New York City.
The idea of taking New York by storm is one of the deepest and oldest in American culture. King Kong climbed a skyscraper there; more recently, Godzilla laid waste to the city as Matthew Broderick watched on. Just about every good-sized monster has wrecked the city in some capacity, but the city always survives. Like America, New York is indestructible – veven when it becomes a giant prison!
But what happens when the monster wants to live in New York?
In less than a decade, Swift became and encompassed country music. More or less single-handedly (one could argue to include the many co-writers and performers she’s worked with along the way), she spurred a mutation of country music, taking it from a hard rock-with-pedal-steel to a more pop form. Sure, she was country, she even played a banjo in a music video, but this wasn’t something you played while hauling ass in a F-350 either.
Nashville quickly copied her success, as bands like Mumford & Sons and The Band Perry sprung up and followed the same game plan. Before long, country acts were getting closer and closer to sounding like everything else. When Kacey Musgrave opened her last album with plucked guitars, twanging telecasters, and a pedal steel, it sounded like something from a different era. Maybe that’s why she named it Same Trailer Different Park.
Meanwhile, Swift was growing by the minute. Even by Red, she was dropping the country sound and going hard after a more mainstream crowd. Where she once sang about the boy driving a Chevy truck that got stuck, now she cracked jokes about hipsters and indie records, hung out with people in animal costumes, and wore oversized glasses. This wasn’t your parent’s idea of country.
At the same time, there was an undercurrent going on in her music. She was still writing about breakups, but was going by a different playbook: she was partying at her ex’s expense and proudly stating she was “never, ever getting back together” with them.
Critics and fans like to speculate who she’s written these songs about: what ex was represented in which song. Swift took a shot at these critics, too: “You don’t know about me / but I bet you want to,” she sang in 22. She knows you’re talking about her. And she’s not sharing any answers.
But the more I go back to that and compare it to 1989, I keep thinking about how Swift’s songs have weird little cues. In “Shake It Off,” she says to shake off the haters. In “Blank Space,” she tells the listener she’ll leave you with a nasty scar. and “I Know Places” seems preoccupied with the media. But the videos for this album all seem to show a fun, silly side to Swift. They don’t really seem to mesh: her music’s saying stuff that doesn’t match the images. So what is she saying then? Is Swift angrier than we’ve bothered to realize? And what does that say about us, the audience?
I keep thinking about Joni Mitchell. For the first part of her career, she was considered just a folk singer. A great one, yes, but still part of the folk tradition. Critics marginalized her music until it became too impassioned, stark, and blunt to ignore any longer. Even now, Ladies of the Canyon is too powerful to ignore: it’s blunt, depressing, impassioned and personal. It might be the best album to come out of the LA scene, no small feat given her peers.
But what’s more interesting is Mitchell’s career path. After taking folk as far as she could with Blue and For the Roses, she followed up with Court and Spark, a home run swing of an album. “Raised on Robbery” was wild, swaggering rock, “Free Man in Paris” was jazzy pop and “Help Me” was about as mainstream as, well, “Shake It Off.” It showed Mitchell outgrowing a style of music as her ideas, lyrics, and performances grew too large for just one style.
She was revamping her back catalogue, too. In 1974, she toured with the LA Express, a crack jazz-fusion band. “Woodstock” went from a piano ballad to a slow, moody blues-rock, “Car On A Hill” exploded into a saxophone solo. By decade’s end, Mitchell was recording albums with jazz figures like Jaco Pastorius, Charles Mingus, and Pat Methany. And she had some of her strongest albums: Hejira, Shadows and Light, Wild Things Run Fast.
What I’m saying is Swift’s hardly the first artist to outgrow a genre. It happens all the time, but hardly ever on a scale like this, when an artist is so popular, moving so much product and putting so many butts in seats. And she’s really putting herself out there: for 1989, she’s done sit-down interviews with a handful of Canadian TV networks, running on everything from Much Music to CMT to YTV. When was the last time any musician had a campaign like this? Not even Kanye West pushes himself out as much as Swift has in the last little while.
And all the while, it’s like a certain image is getting pushed harder and harder. She’s outgrown country, but she’s outgrown her past, too. Where before her songs were reactive, now they’re proactive. She isn’t singing about breakups or the past, she’s singing about the present. 1989 is almost a song cycle about moving to New York, hanging out with friends, struggling with relationships, and, yes, shaking off the haters.
In the video for “Shake It Off,” Swift constantly pokes fun at herself: she can’t do the hand moves, can’t keep up with the dancers, looks foolish when dressed in Lady Gaga’s neo-futurist fashion or in old-school hip-hop attire. The entire point is she’s supposed to be fun and self-aware. She knows how silly she looks and she knows you know, too.
Thing is, Swift’s always shown a bit of a mean side to go with this silliness. When someone breaks up, they’re “never, ever” going back. The press doesn’t just hound her, they chase her like hounds chasing a fox. And the haters are always going to hate. It’s only there in flashes on 1989, but it’s interesting to see her growth as a performer and how she’ll handle her explosive success. Personally? I hope she embraces her dark side and lets loose, turns into Joni Mitchell and goes on a Godzilla-size rampage. It won’t be pretty, it certainly won’t be nice, but man, I bet it’ll sound good.