sansacinderellalily: star-anise: sweetsigyn: maevecurrywrites: missviolethunter: My dear Miss Nonny: How do you in Nonnyland? Here we are having a very hot and uncomfortable summer, but thankfully in the last few days we have been blessed with a delicious cool breeze. It pains me to see you so concerned about Miss Swift’s reputation. How immensely thoughtful… Continue reading Tom does not respect Taylor. She put out too soon. He will marry a wholesome girl.
Tag: taylor swift
The New Yorker’s review of Adams’s 1989 (it’s worth noting that the magazine did not review Taylor Swift’s album at all), is headlined “Haters Gonna Hate”. Like Guilt by Association, the joke dismisses the pop artists at the music’s core: “You’re going to hate this, but we actually reviewed an album written by Taylor Swift”. In it, Ian Crouch writes that Adams’s cover is “subversive” and “more sincere than the original”:
“‘Blank Space’, Swift’s posh, sexy provocation about the thrills of being a wild woman, becomes, in Adams’s hands, a hushed, whispery lamentation of troubled love. In that song, Swift’s ‘long list of ex-lovers’ is a boast about the hearts she’s broken; the same line, sung by Adams, is a warning about his emotional baggage, the heartbreaks he’s suffered.”
Crouch’s criticism is undeniably gendered. Swift is hypersexual and uncomplicated: something to be looked at, rather than seriously listened to. Indeed, for Crouch, Adams’s achievement is that he didn’t sympathetically engage with Swift’s lyrics at all, but simply appropriated her words by applying them to his own, more complex, man emotions.
“Something in his state of mind and musical sensibility listened to the romantic exuberance of a young woman’s pop album and heard his own melancholy. He responded with music that is both personal and generous.”
When Crouch celebrates Adams’s generosity and candidness, he does so because he sees these qualities that Swift’s original lacks. Where Swift is “goofy”, “wistful” or even “banal”, Adams is “urgent, confessional, lonely”. Of course, these are the qualities that Adams, a genuine fan of Swift, so admires in the original songs. “They’re constructed from such an honest place,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “They’re all completely giving.” In the same interview, he also said that he sees Swift and himself as singing about the same things: “The world of romance and the confusion of being alive and knowing how you fit in – all that stuff is there. It’s what we write about.” This is hardly surprising: Adams and Swift are both singer-songwriters rooted in country music, who slowly but surely started pushing at the edges of their genre. The only difference is that while Adams danced around the mainstream, Swift was catapulted towards it.
A whole range of publications make a similar claim that Adams’s masculine, alternative cover lifts Swift’s original to higher plains. Even reviews that laud Swift’s original achievement applaud Adams for making us realise its strength, as though Swift’s album alone could never convince us. The Atlantic wrote that Adams “vindicated” Swift; the Telegraph that he exposes “emotion beating beneath [her] gleaming surfaces”; the A.V. Club that he provided “a stark reminder that Swift’s songwriting continues to deserve respect and kudos”. (Seemingly, only Pretty Much Amazing thought to invert this patriarchal logic with their piece, “Taylor Swift Writes Ryan Adams’ Best Album”.)
It’s a response that will be eerily familiar to women across the globe who have sat in a meeting and watched as their ideas have been shot down, only to be taken seriously when co-opted by a male colleague. Who have listened to male friends repeat their own jokes back to them, as though they had hit on something funny utterly by accident. Even with the intention of celebrating her, Ryan Adams has made it possible for dozens of music journalists to mansplain Swift’s own album to her.
Monsters' Queen 