Taylor Swift II: Back with a vengeance? Um, no.

I think someone at Universal Music might be a fan of this blog. Back in February, I wrote that Taylor Swift's mega stardom had a lot to do with her middle-of-the-road approach to sex appeal. She was an every-girl whose music and persona were scientifically engineered to relate to the maximum number of people possible. Unlike her hyper-sexed singing starlet peers, Swift was a practically virginal teen idol with record sales to prove she was more popular than all the other girls with microphones in the country. (To me it was a persona that I found essentially lame, though I don't find the inverse all that exciting either.)

But hold on! Weeks before Swift's brand new record, Speak Now, hit stores on Tuesday, celebrity news sites snapped, crackled and popped with news of the singer's rebukes to a host of past boyfriends. The most scandalous example -- so said the "news" reports -- was the song "Dear John," a tell-all aimed squarely at her former flame John Mayer (Talk about a pop romance designed by record execs...). There were other actors/singers implicated, too (I don't even know who they are, thank God). The suggestion: Swift had gotten a little wild and loose since her last album. Maybe America's little country singing girl was not so little any more. In the interest of music journalism, I decided to bite. I listened to the record.

Kings of Leon: Where did the mojo go?

The Kings of Leon before their music industry makeover.

On their debut album Youth and Young Manhood, Kings of Leon frontman Caleb Followill screeched the following warning to mothers in the chorus of "Happy Alone":

I'm gonna tangle my face hair. It's gonna tickle your daughter.

3 o'clock in the morning, they all cry to me.

I'll be prancin' around in my high heels and your cherry red lipstick.

Look out your window. I'm on your street.

Followill is part of a four-man clan of Tennessee rednecks (three brothers and a younger cousin) who had spent their youth backing up their revival-tent-preaching father, Leon, and had given up the holy roller life for the sex and danger of conventional rock and roll. In the band's infancy, they sounded every bit like the Appalachian Stooges. They were raw and powerful. They were genuine American minstrel rebel weirdoes. 

A Kings of Leon head scratcher: a question in video form

How do you go from being the redneck Stooges...


To the redneck Pixies...


To U2, the "Rattle and Hum" years?


The Kings of Leon: 40 years of music (d)evolution in a decade...