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Jody, I found your description of the Taylor Swift concert at Madison Square Garden—as well as the experience of listening to her music for the past week as preparation for our discussion of Swift on the last Slate Culture Gabfest—unexpectedly moving. Top 10 hits by 19-year-old country-pop starlets aren’t usually high in my iPod rotation, so no one could be more surprised than I am that I now know several of Swift’s songs by heart. (Stephen Metcalf, the Gabfest’s host and resident curmudgeon, can be heard gagging in the background; he and Jody are currently engaged in a Taylor Swift smackdown over at the podcast’s Facebook page.)
It could be that I’m so far outside the age demographic for T-Swift fandom that I’ve circled back around and entered it again. Even before watching that clip of the 15,000-girl campfire singalong at the Garden (or getting sniffly at "The Best Day," her insidiously catchy tribute to her mother), I found that I was listening to Swift as a parent: touched by her youthful talent, worrying about how she’ll negotiate the transition from teen phenomenon to adult professional musician, and hoping to God that when my daughter is 15, she’ll be listening to something like Swift’s “Fifteen” and not whatever the equivalent of Britney Spears will be in 2019. Better yet, maybe my girl will be writing her own earnest ballads about freshman anxiety. Whether you like her music or not, it's great to think that Swift's success as a singer-songwriter (as opposed to a pneumatic lip-synching doll) could inspire the next generation of girls to pick up a guitar and learn to play.
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Last Thursday, the 19-year-old singer-songwriter Taylor Swift played Madison Square Garden. A headlining show at the Garden is a watershed moment for any musician. For Swift, it was exclamation point on the obvious: singing smart, catchy songs about teenage romance in the suburbs, she has become the biggest pop star in the United States.
Over the past couple years, Swift has been a one-woman bulwark against the complete implosion of the record industry. In 2008, she was the biggest-selling artist in America, with combined sales of her 2006 self-titled debut album and her 2008 release Fearless topping 3.6 million. This year, Fearless has moved another 1.6 million copies; its sales totals are second only to the Michael Jackson compilation Number Ones. Swift has released eight singles, all of which have reached the country Top 10 and the Top 40 on the pop charts. She's had four No. 1 country singles; her latest hit, "You Belong with Me," climbs to No. 2 this week on the Billboard Hot 100.
There have been other milestones. No female artist has had as many hits from a debut album since Billboard began keeping an album chart in 1964. This year, Fearless held the No. 1 spot on the Billboard Hot 200 album chart for a total of 11 weeks, the longest run in a decade. Three of Swift's singles have topped two million mark in paid downloads, a first for a country artist. And so on.
Swift's triumph is on the one hand a measure of her ability to scramble categories and defy music biz dictums. There's never really been a country teenpop starlet before. She is surely the only country artist in history to open concerts by rapping Eminem's "Lose Yourself" and to close her shows with cover versions of hits by Beyoncé and Rihanna. At Madison Square Garden, she segued from her ballad "You're Not Sorry" into Justin Timberlake's "What Goes Around ... Comes Around."
Like every megastar worth her salt, Swift has built a multi-platform brand with calendars and a clothing line; $39.99 will get you a vaguely sinister-looking "Taylor Swift Singing Doll" that croons Swift's 2007 hit "Our Song." But while Swift manages her career with the ruthless pragmatism of a CEO, her do-it-yourself approach to music resonates with the codes of authenticity championed by rock purists. She writes (or co-writes) all her songs, plays guitar, answers to no Svengali, and doesn't rely on a high-priced corps of studio musicians and producers. She records for an independent label and speaks to a devoted audience in an eccentric, sui generis voice that mixes high-Nashville earnestness with the Esperanto of the foodcourt and the chatroom.
It was that voice that resonated at Madison Square Garden. The concert was a high-tech extravaganza, with video montages and backup dancers, costume changes and an onstage rainstorm. But the music cut through the spectacle. Swift's vocals have occasionally been wobbly, but at the Garden she sang with punch and confidence. What really shone, though, were the songs themselves—the rigorous architecture of hits like "You Belong with Me," "Should Have Said No," and "Love Story," whose melodies arc inexorably towards the payoff of huge sing-along choruses.
The night before Swift's Garden show, Britney Spears' "Circus Tour" played the same room. Taylor would appear to be the anti-Britney; she has plugged a gaping hole in popular culture with music aimed at young women that manages, miraculously, to be both cool and wholesome. But if songs like "Love Story," which ends with a white dress and a wedding, offer comfort to parents, Swift is not a milquetoast. She is famous for seeking revenge on ne'er-do-well ex-boyfriends in song, and for naming names. Introducing one song, she told the Garden audience that an ex made a big mistake when he "cheated on a songwriter." The sellout crowd—almost entirely female, and under 18 years old—roared, but I suspect they were cheering less about the vengeance than the songwriting. How cool must Swift seem to a 12-year-old fan—a tall, gangly girl with a guitar who can turn the exultations and defeats of her emotional life into art while whipping her blond mane around like a dervish?
Swift's bond with her fans came into sharpest focus in the evening's highlight, when the singer waded through the crowd to the center of the arena to sing an acoustic version of "Fifteen," a ballad about muddling through the heartache of freshman year in high school. (See embedded video above.) It's not Swift's catchiest song, but it's her best—an excruciatingly honest diary entry that climaxes with a confession about Swift's real life best friend, Abigail: "Abigail gave everything she had to a boy/ Who changed his mind/ And we both cried." I've seen a lot of amazing live music over the years, but few moments of symbiosis between performer and audience like an arena full of girls singing along to Swift's gentle pep talk.
When the mini-set was over, Swift plunged into the crowd and made her way back to the main stage, where she received the longest, most ear-splitting ovation I've heard at a concert. (A friend likened the din to the famous screeching sound effect in Hitchcock's The Birds.) Like a diva, Swift milked the moment for all it was worth; but as the cheering grew louder, and louder still, it seemed less about Swift, per se, than an expression of communal might. Girl power is real, and it is loud.
Dana Stevens responds, explaining why moms like Taylor Swift.
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I had high hopes when I learned that Taylor Swift and T-Pain were performing together on last night's CMT Music Awards. Two of the most world's most appealing pop stars, mashing up hip-hop, country, and teenpop? A lil' bit of pedal steel, a lil' bit of Auto-Tune? I canceled dinner plans. I switched off the Mets game. And I put myself way out on a limb: I tweeted my excitement.
Bad move. Instead of a live performance, the CMT broadcast opened with a video, "Thug Story," in which T-Pain crooned auto-tune-swathed backing vocals while "T-Swift" flashed a diamond grill and rapped about knitting sweaters. It was, in other words, the latest—the millionth?—example of the White Folks Can't Rap novelty tune, that ubiquitous sketch comedy routine that hammers home a single punch line again and again: Check out this honky rapping—isn't that a riot?
Well, maybe it was in 1983. That was the year of "Rappin' Rodney," in which Rodney Dangerfield reeled off a series of borscht-encrusted one-liners over a thumping beat. Shortly thereafter, Doonsbury creator Garry Trudeau masterminded "Rap Master Ronnie," a mildly—very mildly—amusing spoof of President Reagan.
In other words, this joke is almost as old, and precisely as funny, as "Why did the chicken cross the road?" Yet it continues to get told and told again. Weird Al Yankovic has been working the white and nerdy hip-hop angle for at least a decade. Every time Saturday Night Live's writers are stuck, they disgorge a bit like "Palin Rap." ("My name is Sarah Palin/ You all know me/ Vice-prezzy nominee/ Of the GOP.") On YouTube, you can watch endless variations on the theme: white dudes rapping about Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, about their mopeds, about their inability to "keep a damn beat," about ultimate Frisbee, about organic produce, about Vermont. And the geeky white rapper gag isn't just sketch-comedy fodder; it's a career choice. MC Frontalot and MC Hawking (as in Stephen) are leading lights of nerdcore, a subgenre predicated on the inherent hilariousness of rap songs about Boba Fett.
If YouTube viewing statistics and viral blogging action are any measure, this one-note gag continues to elicit uproarious laughter, across the demographic spectrum. Has a hack comedy routine ever had such cachet? When nuclear physicists, Kanye West, and Karl Rove all agree on a joke, can we safely conclude the joke has lost some of its subversive oomph?
The truth is, "Thug Story" isn't just stale, it's outdated. There are plenty of white MCs these days, and very few are like Vanilla Ice, buffoons obsessed with gangsta authenticity. In fact, one of the best white rappers is a comedian. Andy Samberg has become a 21st-century Tom Lehrer by using hip-hop, his generation's musical lingua franca, as a launching pad for daffy comedy. Samberg's rap parodies flip the nerdcore punchline: They're affectionate genre spoofs, based on Samberg's rapping prowess, his ability to impersonate various hip-hop styles precisely. Listen to "Like a Boss," a spot-on sendup of Slim Thug's bombastic Houston hip-hop, and you'll hear a novel joke: a good white rapper sending up a good black one.
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