Why Taylor Swift doesn't matter

Don't Blame Me

For a while as a teenager I kept a book in the downstairs bog called Why AC/DC Matters. It’s a classic example of a non-fiction book that should have been a blog post, but it amused me, mostly because the title annoyed my brother.

“AC/DC don’t matter,” he would say, every time he remembered the book existed. We still talk about it occasionally, which is more than can be said for the many forgettable rock biographies I’ve read¹.

The arguments against Acca Dacca are familiar enough. By the band’s own admission, they’ve not advanced beyond their debut album, making the same classic rock record and over. When rhythm guitarist Malcolm Young had to retire due to dementia they even subbed in another Young, raising the prospect that the band has an indefinite supply of goblin guitarists to call on.

That one album AC/DC kept making is nonetheless pretty good. I daresay it is ‘seminal’. To the extent there is a rock canon – Rolling Stone’s greatest album list is a good starting point – AC/DC merits a place for their ‘iconic’ (yes, yes, I apologise) riffs and Bon Scott’s raw vocal style. They are that rare band that defined a genre.

In others words, AC/DC matter. And I’d contend they matter more than Taylor Swift.

The magic trick is to make $1bn while not doing anything that interesting. Credit: Jana Zills

Obviously that statement will seem like lunacy given Swift’s success. Bloomberg reckons that the singer-songwriter’s latest Eras tour has turned her into a billionaire, while also adding $4.3bn to US GDP. Time magazine has just made her Person of the Year². In October last year she took the Top 10 spots in the Billboard Hot 100. She has 110m monthly listeners on Spotify. For comparison, my band has 13.

Jaded hacks have been bemoaning her ubiquity and the fawning praise of client journalists, with Stefan Rhys-Williams providing a representative example:

“She’s everywhere, all at once. Totally ubiquitous and omnipresent. And her celebrity possesses a particular quality that’s not shared by other – also incredibly famous – pop stars or musicians or actors or reality TV personalities.

That is, she’s lavished with fawning praise from every conceivable quarter. She simply isn’t criticised; and nor are there many people advocating for a little restraint or perspective in the media.”

Rhys-Williams isn’t alone in being disturbed by the feting of Swift. Freddie deBoer says he is “genuinely frightened by her fanbase; they are as vindictive and remorseless a social force as I can remember in online life.” He points to those camping out for five months for her concert tickets as “gross and scary and sad”.

I agree with that last point, although I don’t find Swift intruding on my consciousness that much. I can’t even recall hearing Swift in the pub or a shop, which suggests even if her music came on it wasn’t that offensive to me. The free PR she gets is annoying, but she’s not the only beneficiary of this trend³.

I nonetheless concede Swift is around too much. There can’t be many Americans who aren’t aware of her, and I suspect she’s got similar traction in most Western countries that play a lot of American music. She must rank among the most famous people in the world.

And yet despite this success and the reach it’s given her, does she matter? Beyond banking that cash, I don’t think so.

Consider this comment by another singer-songwriter of note, Billy Joel. He told USA Today that Swift is “like that generation’s Beatles”. This is either a sad comment on Joel’s judgement or a sadder comment on how pathetic millennials’ cultural contributions have been.

The Beatles, to remind you, completely changed what people expected of pop music, progressing from dippy love songs into psychedelic rock while becoming a symbol of the sixties revolution in social attitudes. Much of this had little to do with their talents and much to do with being in the right place at the right time, but they are still the most significant pop music artist, without qualification.

Swift has sold or streamed a lot of records, shifted tour tickets and merch. Her music is mostly fine. Most of her catalogue is entirely unremarkable contemporary pop, typical in terms of melodies, lyrics and production values.

No doubt for many women of a certain age, Swift’s music is redolent of their adolescence or early twenties, but this is just a fluke of time. There’s music I enjoy listening to just because it takes me back, but I acknowledge much of it is mediocre or crap. See Blink 182.

There is of course a power to be had in simply being played a lot. No doubt Swift will be influential, cited by a clutch of female singer-songwriters and other pop stars for decades to come. They’ll still be playing her songs on the radio in 30 years’ time, assuming people still listen to radio.

But can anyone with a straight face tell you that Swift embodies anything beyond her own business empire? That she captures the essence of the 2010s in the same way that the Beatles defined the sixties?

No, you can’t. Billie Eilish’s first album says more than Swift’s entire output. She simply isn’t that interesting. This is ideal in a radio-friendly unit shifter, but does not make for good art.

By comparison, while AC/DC spend a lot of time singing about their own genre of music, at least there’s some gristle in there. Can you imagine Swift singing a song about getting the clap? She’d be too busy musing on some tedious beef with Kanye West. And that’s why Taylor Swift doesn’t matter.

1. Most rock biographies stop being interesting once the subject has attained massive success and the good albums have been covered. The one that sticks out in my mind as unusually good (and written somewhat thematically) is When Giants Walked the Earth, covering Led Zeppelin.

2. This puts Swift in the ranks of such great people of history as, err, Hitler and Stalin.

3. Swift’s three-hour shows are impressive, but Bruce Springsteen has matched this for a while and is double her age. A friend of mine once described the Boss’s performances as less a gig, more an endurance event.