{"id":17271,"date":"2025-01-25T13:44:43","date_gmt":"2025-01-25T13:44:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/?p=17271"},"modified":"2025-01-25T13:44:43","modified_gmt":"2025-01-25T13:44:43","slug":"scratch-that-taylor-swift-is-a-dime-store-novelist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/2025\/01\/25\/scratch-that-taylor-swift-is-a-dime-store-novelist\/","title":{"rendered":"Scratch That: Taylor Swift is a Dime-Store Novelist"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">The poet <span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><a style=\"color: #0000ff;\" href=\"https:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/author\/haley-hodges\/\">Haley Hodges<\/a><\/span> has recently written a winsome essay for <em>Cassandra Voices<\/em> claiming that the Galactic Empress, Her Swiftiness, Queen of Ubiquity, is our \u201c<span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><a style=\"color: #0000ff;\" href=\"https:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/culture\/taylor-swift-is-our-greatest-confessional-poet\/\">greatest confessional poet.<\/a><\/span>\u201d Let\u2019s leave aside that Tay-Tay isn\u2019t a poet\u2014that song-writing and poetry-writing are different games with different rules\u2014she is certainly a confessional, and one in the terms Hodges outlines. So far, so good. But I want to take issue with the hyperbolic praise in which that essay bathes the Golden Girl.<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">Haley Hodges views Taylor Swift as the greatest current exponent of confessional poetry, which is always a tightrope walk, a precarious style with precarious risks.<a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/mb6WmSp2RM\">https:\/\/t.co\/mb6WmSp2RM<\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hashtag\/TaylorSwift?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">#TaylorSwift<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 CassandraVoices (@VoicesCassandra) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/VoicesCassandra\/status\/1881331526295822572?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">January 20, 2025<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>One has, of course, to account for her success, and I do so by thinking of her as some latter-day Tennyson striding into the enormous gap left in literature by the passing of the Romantics. He became, despite his frequent mediocrity, the national poet simply because there was nothing else around\u2014in much the same way that whatever show aired after <em>Seinfeld<\/em> in the era of broadcast television was bound to be popular simply because people couldn\u2019t be bothered to get up and change the channel.<\/p>\n<p>So it is with Miss Swift. Despite the fact that she can barely sing, play guitar, dance, or write songs, she has somehow become our late empire\u2019s troubadour simply because, well, it seemed like we should have one, and she was there.<\/p>\n<p>I will say, however, that she does seem to have both the sense and the good taste to enlist the talents of better musicians when she finds them as aides-de-camp. I don\u2019t know whether there\u2019s a real relationship here or if he\u2019s just a hired gun, but in finding the guy from The National and letting him do his thing across a couple of her albums, she has shown shrewd awareness of the limits of her own powers. It\u2019s just unfortunate, to me anyway, that she sings over it.<\/p>\n<p>Also in the plus column for Miss Swift is something called \u201cvibes,\u201d which I have on good authority is how the youngsters are measuring musical quality these days. The alternative is to measure something like albums, songs, or performances, but I do have to admit that the vibes on an album like <span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><a style=\"color: #0000ff;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=u9xsgqHR1oc\"><em>folklore<\/em><\/a><\/span>\u2014or even the new tortured poets record\u2014are just right. The album art and production quality are suggestive of very specific kinds of scenes, which is to say, ways of being in the world that I think most people are quite hungry for. Perhaps it\u2019s okay that music is serving a different role for this generation than it did for previous ones. Rather than, say, producing memorable songs that one might sing out loud with friends or tap one\u2019s foot to in bars, Swift produces a kind of mood. If that mood is principally tepid, leftist, feminine revenge porn, well, what is that to me?<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Taylor Swift -  folklore  (Deluxe Version) ALBUM Playlist with Lyrics\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/u9xsgqHR1oc?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>But actually, is such a posture all that new? Take punk music, for example. How many of those records are about posture\u2014about a certain way of being in the world\u2014more than they are, say, about musicianship or song-craft? Rather more than a few, I\u2019d think.<\/p>\n<p>In the end, I think of Miss Swift\u2019s accomplishment like I think of the accomplishment of the McDonalds restauranteurs. The fare offered is easy and everywhere. It appeals to an extremely broad base of persons looking for an easy fix. There\u2019s something uniquely American about both products. Some people, of course, may turn their noses up at both. At other times, though, it can be just the thing wanted\u2014especially if it\u2019s late, you\u2019re tired, and hanging out with friends, and no one can think of where else to go.<\/p>\n<p>No. I think the more apt literary key for understanding Swiftian appeal <em>contra<\/em> confessionals is the early novelists. Here\u2019s the oft-forgotten American critic William Dean Howells on what the youngsters were then ingesting: bad writing that does \u201ca great deal of harm in the world.\u201d \u201c[Figures like Swift]\u201d he argues, \u201cthat heroine, [have] long taught by example, if not precept, that Love, or the passion or fancy she mistook for it, was the chief interest of a life which is really concerned with a great many other things; that it was lasting in the way she knew it; that it was worthy of every sacrifice, and was a finer thing than prudence, obedience, reason; that love alone was glorious and beautiful, and these were mean and ugly in comparison with it.\u201d (From \u201c<span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><a style=\"color: #0000ff;\" href=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/details\/editorsstudy00howe\">The Editor\u2019s Study<\/a><\/span>\u201d 1887).<\/p>\n<p>This is precisely Swift\u2019s contribution to world culture, in my view. She works to elevate not-even-the-state-of, but the <em>feeling<\/em> of being in love to the <em>ne plus ultra<\/em> of human experience. Her obsession with dopey, high-school boys and floppy hair made sense when she was a teenaged songwriter, appealing mostly to other teens whose concerns tend to be similarly circumscribed. But I expected\u2014I thought we all expected\u2014that she\u2019d grow out of them.<\/p>\n<p>We were wrong. Her emotional range is the same. Her jealousies are the same. Her available subjects are the same now, in her 30\u2019s, a billionaire, as they were walking past the lockers hoping to be noticed. That too would be fine; cases of arrested development are legion, except that she foists this worldview so broadly about. Thanks to her, several generations of women have been baptized into the shallow end of the kiddie pool, there to thrash about and encourage one another in their Mean Girls affectations.<\/p>\n<p>I don\u2019t know. At the beginning of his essay, Howells cautions about reading to much into these pulp offerings: \u201cthe [art] that aims merely to entertain\u2014the [art] that is to serious fiction as the <em>opera buffe<\/em>\u2026and the pantomime are to the true drama\u2014need not feel the burden of this obligation so deeply.\u201d That\u2019s probably right. That\u2019s what she\u2019s doing. It\u2019s entertainment. We don\u2019t have to take it so seriously. It\u2019s what Liam Gallagher of Oasis once referred to as \u201cjunk food music.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>And there\u2019s nothing wrong with a little junk food! This is America! Have some. Enjoy yourself. But let\u2019s not make the category mistake of thinking it counts as cuisine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The poet Haley Hodges has recently written a winsome essay for Cassandra Voices claiming that the Galactic Empress, Her Swiftiness, Queen of Ubiquity, is our \u201cgreatest confessional poet.\u201d Let\u2019s leave aside that Tay-Tay isn\u2019t a poet\u2014that song-writing and poetry-writing are different games with different rules\u2014she is certainly a confessional, and one in the terms Hodges [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17276,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[272,1368,1476,2104,2471,6713,8182,8802,8862,8866,8869,8870,8873,8895,8917,10126],"class_list":["post-17271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","tag-a-curmudgeon","tag-cassandra-voices-culture","tag-cassandra-voices-taylor-swift","tag-culture","tag-dime-store","tag-novelist","tag-scratch","tag-swift","tag-taylor","tag-taylor-swift-comparison-to-mcdonalds","tag-taylor-swift-dime-store-novelist","tag-taylor-swift-mcdonalds","tag-taylor-swift-critique","tag-tennyson","tag-that","tag-william-dean-howells"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17271\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}