Neo-country singer Taylor Swift is breaking all records. But their music is rather random and rather unspectacular. What makes the American such a global phenomenon anyway?
Yeah, you can’t like Adele. Find Queen overly pathetic, Metallica stupid, Abba silly, David Bowie boring or Lana Del Rey affected. A matter of taste! But: No one who even has an antenna for music would objectively deny such record stars their artistic importance. Their cultural formative power, their creative input and their pop-historical influence are simply undisputed: They have objectively moved a lot in music beyond themselves, helped determine directions and set impulses with their pieces and sounds.
But Taylor Swift? The American, born in 1989, has dominated the streaming market with her neo-country pop for some of the last few years, single-handedly, and the worldwide charts anyway. The more than 250 million records sold in the Internet age would have to be extrapolated by a factor of 10 in order to be able to compare them with the record sales of the 70s and 80s in a reasonably meaningful way. For her eight albums, released since 2008, she has written almost every music award in the pop world. The fact that she has just shot ten (!) singles from her recently released ninth album “Midnights” into the top 10 of the still relevant US charts is little more than just another Swift superlative for the global headlines.
Nevertheless, the singer is hard to grasp musically, especially for many, let’s say “traditional” music lovers. Because they are used to understanding a singer through her songs, her records – and if you want to empathize with this through conscious listening, you will find, even if you open-heartedly walk through a wide field between the Nine Inch Nails and Amy Whinehouse and have no reservations about contact with the mainstream, simply no barbs on the shiny Swift surface: the woman’s music does not provide any impulses for pop, does not explore new extremes, but at the same time is not so bad that one can call it overly polished American would have to classify industrial goods. Swift is described quite well as “unspectacular”, especially since her voice, compared to that of other superlative stars, is “only” a good average.
In the new episode of the podcast “Needle Committed”, the Chemnitz musician and DJ train driver Andi now clearly explains why this makes many music fans from 30 upwards rather perplexed: Taylor Swift is, in short, not a musical phenomenon. But a multimedia one that works primarily via the social networks of the Internet. The American does not trigger her countless fans there with clever advertising – but with the skill of putting young life stories between globally common banality and painful breaks in appropriate words and thereby connecting the insignificant with the significant. She not only has the antenna for the experiences of the new generation, but also the right empathy and the skill to depict them with story songs and Instagram pictures alike.
One doesn’t work without the other, in an ambivalence of defiance and doubt: “Hello, it’s me, I’m the problem, it’s me” she sings in her new number 1 single “Antihero”: “Hello, me it’s me, I’m the problem”: It is the open interlocking of her own world of experience with that of her fans that makes Swift so important. The way she interprets allusions to past relationships in texts and internet posts into a large puzzle and thereby empowers herself as a woman and human being makes her a role model for a whole generation. You have to hear their hearts beating to understand Taylor Swift fans. Because their self-empowerment cannot be seen in their music. But listen for yourself: