The ascent of Taylor Swift: the rise of safe sex, country style

I was going to contemplate the Who's Super Bowl appearance in a post titled "The Who & The Super Bowl: Perfect Together," but I realized the sentence said all I needed. What more is there to write about the perfect combination of a juggernaut arena sport and the biggest, loudest arena band of all time? Column done.

Instead, I thought I'd explore something completely different: The dazzling super-fame and success of Taylor Swift.

I'm late to this party. And I have to admit that I have been exposed to virtually none of Taylor Swift's music before I set out to write this. In fact, I went on a brief listening bender of Swift to get a feel for her oeuvre (That's a line that would make Beavis snicker for sure). But, the thing that's interesting about Taylor Swift to me is that I suspect -- in fact I'm pretty sure -- that her music has virtually nothing to do with her success of the last year in which she's won more major music awards in a shorter period than any artist, ever.1

First, let's just assume for the sake of argument that in the world of country music Taylor Swift is really that good. I went and did a Youtube tour of Swift's hits and can find nothing remarkable about the music at all. It sounds like all of contemporary country, which is to say it is a music drained of anything compelling. There is no danger, no sex, no violence. There is no emotion more complicated than teen-aged longing.2 But let's just assume that Swift is the best of this sexless lot.

But that doesn't change the wonder of Swift's domination of all of popular music. Why Taylor Swift? Why has a country artist been lauded with Album of the Year and Best Video awards, muscling aside big hip hop, rock and R&B acts like Beyonce, Green Day, Lil Wayne and/or Jay Z?

Perhaps it's sales. If music awards truly were a popularity contest, then Swift deserved all her awards. Her Fearless was the top selling album of all of 2009. It is currently number 13 on the Billboard charts after 64 weeks. Cultural elites love to sniff at sales as obviously void of serious significance.3 But hey, a lot of people clearly like Swift. And a lot of people like Swift more than anyone else. That's gotta count for something, right?

Well I think it's a clue. The fact that Swift's album is the best selling record of 2009 means that she is liked by a very wide margin. She's sold more than 5 million albums in an era when people no longer buy albums. This is significant.

But What makes Swift so popuar?

First: Swift is irrefutably attractive. She's an ideal country crooner for 2010: tall, willowy, blond and beautiful. She favors dresses if not gowns. She's glamorous, never casual.

Second, and this might be counter intuitive in a nation that seems to be in a constant state of moral decline: Swift is very wholesome. She is not Pamela Anderson. In several videos I saw, Swift appears as a student -- an everygirl with an armload of books who has finally put the guitar down to go to class and pine for a young man, often portrayed by the kind of guy best described as an Abercrombie and Fitch model (who are not wearing cowboy hats). She has been linked to know controversy or slip of character that I can find.

Like a presidential candidate, Swift has become wildly successful by sticking to the middle of the road better than anyone else. She is inoffensive, modestly talented (or just talented enough) to sing her way to super stardom. Swift is an ideal of the middle road, an empty slate on which young and old can assign her a meaning: dream friend, dream daughter, dream girlfriend, etc. and so forth. It is easy to be infatuated with someone who has good looks and fails to offend.

What it means beyond Swift's super fame, is that country music has ascended to a remarkable position in popular American culture. This is not outlaw music anymore. Swift's mediocrity is not remarkable for the genre -- a genre in which all of the innovations have been cosmetic. Country music stars are all attractive and few traffic in the old gimmicks once expected of them (when was the last time a cowboy outfits really struck anyone as authentic?4). Swift's fame might have happened to any number of young, attractive and unoffensive songsters. What country has done is remade the classic "aw shucks" modesty into an affect that is both sexy and safe at the same time, at least when it isn't busy with boorish jingoism.

Could the trend continue? Have Americans really decided to part ways with the much more sexed and far less safe best-selling acts like Eminem, L'il Wayne and 50 Cent (see footnote 3) in favor of an idealized star, a pretty young blond from Pennsylvania preoccupied with teenage romanticism? The cynic in me believes that perhaps what country music is really offering is an alternative to white America that is free of nearly any trace of the urban, the immigrant and the brown. It's an alternative that is being gobbled up, too.5

But perhaps you don't have to be white to want your music sheltered from the underside of American culture that is so often pervasive in a lot of other forms of music, film and TV. Either way, Swift's popularity is remarkable. It marks something completely new, even if we don't understand all of it just yet.

Footnotes:
1. This is an un-researched conclusion, but its based on real numbers. Since 2006, Swift has been nominated for 86 awards and received 59 of them. In the last year she's swept the CMAs, BMIs and Billboard awards. She's won MTV awards and Grammys. She's even won an award in Thailand for international artist. By comparison, U2, the band that has won 22 Grammys -- more than any other music act ever -- has won 67 awards in 30 years of recording.

2. Is there a musical genre that has fallen farther than country? Country used to be all danger and violence. It told the story of primordial America in all its gritty horror. Don't believe me? Listen to the blind guitarist Doc Watson's Ballads from Deep Gap a collection of traditional country and blues songs full of murdered lovers, train crashes and shootouts. That, my friends, is country music.

3. This is quite true. The list of year-by-year est selling albums is a wasteland of mediocrity. In the '00s these are the best selling acts, beginning in 2000: N'Sync, Linkin Park, Eminem, 50 Cent, Usher, Maria Carey, High School Musical: the Soundtrack (!), Josh Grobin (!!!), Lil Wayne and Swift.

4. Which forces one to ponder: What the hell is wrong with Bob Dylan these days, anyway?

5. This is from Wikipedia on Country Music: While album sales of most musical genres have declined, country music experienced one of its best years in 2006, when, during the first six months, U.S. sales of country albums increased by 17.7 percent to 36 million. Moreover, country music listening nationwide has remained steady for almost a decade, reaching 77.3 million adults every week, according to the radio-ratings agency Arbitron, Inc.^[4][5]"