by Joshua Gibbs

There’s a lot to object to about Taylor Swift. Her music is shallow, her mind is weak, her feelings are trite and vacuous. Her taste in men and the rate at which she burns through them suggest she is both boring and easily bored. And her public persona strikes me as rather fake even for a celebrity. However, it’s not for any of these reasons that I don’t allow my daughters to listen to her music. They listen to David Bowie, Tom Petty, The Beatles, The Beach Boys, and The Rolling Stones, all of whom might be judged shallow and trite when compared with the likes of Bach or even Puccini. The reason I don’t let my daughters listen to Taylor Swift is that she’s really, really popular.

While Taylor Swift is arguably the most famous musician since Michael Jackson (especially during his Dangerous tour in the early 90s), she is also merely the most popular musician of the moment. When I began teaching twenty years ago, it was Kanye West. Then it was One Direction. Then it was Drake. While there’s some sense in which “the people” elect to make any of these artists popular, there is also a point at which any one of them has become so profoundly popular, it’s not so much that an individual chooses to become a fan as it is the individual is swept along into fandom by the sheer power of that artist’s cultural momentum.

In other words, if a certain fourteen-year-old girl became a Taylor Swift fan this week (“I think I’m going to buy one of her CDs when we go to Target next time, but I haven’t decided which one”), it would be less of a choice than a refusal to make a more deliberate, interesting choice. At this point, listening to Taylor Swift is nothing more than an act of obedience to the zeitgeist. The adolescent girl has aptly read the signs of the times and knows that her kind is expected to listen to this music. She has not selected Taylor Swift. Rather the god of this age has chosen Taylor Swift for you—or you for Taylor Swift.

If a young woman claims she “happens to think Taylor Swift’s music is very good,” she is not altogether different from a sophomore boy (in the year 1993, say) putting a picture of Pamela Anderson up in his locker and saying he “happens to think she is very beautiful.” That young man does not happen to think anything. He did not notice Pamela Anderson working at Safeway one day (glasses, bad perm) and comment to his friend, “She’s actually rather pretty for a supermarket cashier.” He did not see Pam in a dowdy, shapeless dress sitting by herself in the back of his Baptist church one Wednesday evening and think, “There’s something really captivating about her that I just can’t put my finger on.” No, he puts up a picture of Pamela Anderson in his locker because he is following a script. The world has determined for him what a desirable woman looks like and because he lacks any imagination whatsoever, he has agreed to go along with it.

Likewise, the young woman who becomes a Taylor Swift fan isn’t freely choosing her music as music from a lineup that also includes Joni Mitchell, Simon & Garfunkel, Depeche Mode, and Janet Jackson. It’s not as though any young woman would tell her family over dinner, “After listening to a great many different bands and recording artists, I have decided to become a fan of Taylor Swift because I was drawn more to her music than any of the others.” On the other hand, if that same young woman was introduced to John Tavener, Edward Elgar, Jessye Norman, Kathleen Battle, Anne Briggs, Benjamin Britten, or Leonard Bernstein in a music class at school, she might tell her family over dinner, “I’ve been listening to Jessye Norman’s recording of Strauss’s Four Last Songs for several days now and I can’t get over how beautiful it is,” her father might honestly reply, “Oh, how interesting. What is it about that music that you find so compelling?” However, there is absolutely no need to ask this question when someone reports they enjoy one of the most popular things in the world.

Very popular things—no matter how good or how bad they are—can offer a kind of pleasure which less popular things can’t offer. It’s not an artistic pleasure. It’s the pleasure that comes from knowing that you’re taking part in something massive, powerful, global, and eminently now. When you listen to Taylor Swift, you are hearing the sound of this age, this time, this moment. Taylor Swift is what the world says today and if you listen to her music, you’re in touch with this world. You commune with it. And it feels good to commune with the world because the world is splendid, glorious, strong, and oh so important. Sixty years ago, the Beatles could offer such communion. Thirty years ago, U2 could offer it. But the world moves on from itself, it jumps from thing to thing to thing, and there’s no betrayal of the world greater than not moving on.

After one has enjoyed the pleasures of communing with the world, quitting becomes increasingly difficult. There is nothing more likely to sweep you on to the next big thing—whatever it is—than allowing yourself to be swept up by this big thing. What’s more, it’s not like music is the only realm of culture which offers the pleasure of communion with the world. There are also wildly popular books, films, clothes, political stances, ideologies, diets, ersatz religions, and styles of worship, each of which claims to be final, eternal, the true and lasting answer to a question which has bedeviled mankind for eons. “What a time to be alive,” the latest thing promises. “Of all the years you could have lived, you just so happen to live now, the best possible time anyone could have lived. You are around to see the dawning of a new thing, a thing everyone will discuss and love well into the distant future. You were present for the founding of it all.” Of course, the next thing promises the same, as does the thing after that. A certain sort of person simply goes with the flow, arbitrarily enjoying the most popular music, arbitrarily reading the most popular books, arbitrarily parroting the most popular ideas, and knows all the while that they don’t really believe any of it. In fact, the very prospect of belief—of indifferently committing your soul to something and never letting go, no matter how much it hurts—becomes harder and harder to stomach every time you allow yourself to be mindlessly shuffled along.

I ask my daughters to listen to old music, and I am willing to count David Bowie, Tom Petty, and The Beach Boys as old music, because they’re all sufficiently unpopular today that you have to go out of your way to find them. It’s not inevitable now that a young person will find Hunky Dory or Full Moon Fever. When a high school student claims an affinity for Bowie, your first question is, “Oh, how did you discover him?” for such a student must be listening to someone in particular—not everyone in general. “How did you find him?” I want that to be a question which characterizes all my children’s tastes.

I want it to be clear that they obey someone older.