Swiftly She Comes

I wasn't planning to post anything on this Boxing Day 2023, but a recent news item about one of Taylor Swift's detractors led me to post this evening.

I have pretty much become resigned to the rewritten history of post-war popular music in which the heroes of pop include not just Chuck Berry and Aretha Franklin but also the musically lightweight dance divas who make their records and write their songs on their own terms and stage their work in a grandiose celebration for themselves and their fans, and the rappers who turned the privilege of  making music into a right by opening it beyond those who actually play instruments.  The villains are the cultural appropriators, the British invaders, the prog rockers, the metal heads, the West Coast folk-pop balladeers, and Billy Joel.  In other words, the white men. 

Charlie Kirk, a right-wing talk radio and podcast host I have only recently heard of, reinforced that cancel-culture history with a vicious and misogynistic attack on Taylor Swift for dressing suggestively (funny, I always thought she was one of the more conservatively dressed pop stars around) while saying she is not very talented and is a narcissist (wait, are you sure you're not talking about someone else, Charlie, like this bleach-blonde exhibitionist from Michigan who goes by one name?), and he also said that she "is a major reason why so many women are angry in America,"  apparently for her songs about her ex-boyfriends, and he called her "a bad role model" with "no redemption."  Kirk also feels like Swift is being forced upon the culture, and he compared it to - get this - colonization.  

And a couple of his confederates were even more vile.  His buddy Tyler Bowyer said the Swift concert he went to was an awfully miserable experience, complaining it was "all women and gays," adding that men don't really enjoy their music and men who say that they like her music actually "fake enjoying Taylor Swift in order to impress women."  

No, Tyler, men fake an interest in the theater to pick up women, though I know from firsthand experience that that's not very effective.

The pièce de résistance was when Kirk and his henchmen said that Swift is losing her ability to reproduce and that she is a threat to the nation for supporting women's and non-heterosexual rights while urging her mostly female audience to register and vote - and vote Democratic.   

Look, I'm not a Swiftie.  However, I have no problem with Taylor Swift.  I've heard her music and while I find it to be bland, I don't find it to be unlistenable or offensive.  And unlike many of her contemporaries, she's genuinely physically attractive.  Heck, I put her on my beautiful-women picture blog once.  The only reason I don't go to a Taylor Swift concert to pick up women is because Taylor Swift fans, like the star herself, are young enough to be my daughters (though I'd certainly make a play for any of their Gen X moms, so long as they're not wearing wedding rings).  And so I can't understand, for the life of me, what makes rhymes-with-glass-poles like Charlie Kirk go after Taylor Swift so viciously when there are other performers far more deserving of their derision who are of similar political persuasions. It can't be the music.

Then again, maybe it is.  Taylor Swift's music is by no means horrendous enough to be lumped in with, say, Nicki Minaj's or Cardi B's, but it's not rock and roll.  It isn't even country rock, at least not any more.  Its pure pop.  Good-quality, confessional, transcendent pop suggesting a David Gates influence, but it's still pop.  And maybe that doesn't sit well with white men like Charlie Kirk because it isn't rock.  Billy Joel recently said that Swift is to her generation what the Beatles were in the sixties.  Fancy that!  That must have caused a lot of heads of classic-rock fans to explode!  

I don't know what sort of music Kirk prefers, but the fact that he clearly does not like Swift's brand of pop suggests that he's basically a rock fan or a country fan who, like this rock fan, is alarmed and appalled by the low quality of today's popular music, but he probably goes after Swift (I won't even get into how he and his buddies think she's a misandrist, when that doesn't make sense as she's obviously still dating) because he knows that going after a diva of color or any rapper you could name will get him in even hotter water than his attacks on Swift have.

I wish he'd stop attacking Swift.  Not just because it's unfair to her, but it's making those of us who hate most of today's popular music look like bigger pricks than we already must.  Like previous generations of pop-music fans who saw their favorite music pushed out of the way by newer pop forms embraced by the young, we rock fans - white and overwhelmingly male, just like most of our idols - grouse about a need to return to good music and how younger generations are ruining pop with their questionable tastes and cultural values.  In other words, we've begun to sound like parents.  But thanks to right-wing activists like Charlie Kirk, we sound like something even worse.

We sound like Republicans.