by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I’m going through a Taylor Swift phase again via my Spotify account and I’m struck by sensitive she is. This is a good thing when it comes to her writing and having an emotional connection to her mostly female audience. And, yet, it seems she’s hurting her career by in album after album pumping out fan service.
She has a great voice. She’s a great performer — Swift can dance 10 times better than Dua Lipa. And she seems pretty self-aware (at times.) She’s dabbled in more adult, mainstream pop — to great success — so it’s not like she can’t do it. But come on, lady, you’re not 22 anymore. You’re a grown ass woman.
You need to be a little bit more edgy. Female rappers are do a lot of creative, interesting things. It wouldn’t hurt Tay-Tay to swerve into some of the conspicuous raunchiness of the rap world. I mean, Ariana Grande has made a whole career in adult contemporary music telling me in excruciating detail how horny she is.
Now, I don’t honestly expect her to do this. No matter how old she — or her fanbase — gets. At the moment, there’s a lot of alluded to sexuality in her lyrics and a lot of “tee-hee I like to drink” references here and there. But Swift would have to produce a “missing link” album for her to be able to do a colab with one of the very talented, interesting female rappers out there. If she made a clean break from her training bra music oeuvre a lot of girls and young women would be heart broken and burst into tears. Not Tay-Tay!
What’s most likely to happen is Swift is going to be a huge, huge star for decades and then at some point in her mid-40s, she will come out with a really provocative album that gets a lot of buzz outside of her core group of fans…and then she turns around and goes back to doing exactly what she’s been doing for decades.
All of this raises the question — am I asking Swift to sell out? I don’t think so. I’m asking her to grow up and challenge her audience and fan base — and maybe herself. I’m still not 100% sure she’s not a virgin. Though she occasionally shoots out a sexxy music video, in general, she’s every white parent’s ideal new member of the family. There’s a reason why Swift had to go way out of her way to say, “I am not a white nationalist.”
And, yet, the case could be made that she serves a purpose in our culture — she’s the exact center of pop culture. She has enough talent not to be boring, but she’s always going to circle the exact center of the pop music world.
Anyway. No one listens to me.
