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.

Before I go any further, I should explain that all contemporary country sounds the same to me. It's an incredibly homogenous schlock of a genre that doesn't even resemble anything rural any more. It is basically easy listening soft rock for the kind of white people who are afraid of big cities (Minorities! Sin! Crime! Tall buildings!) It's as if the music biz people behind '80s fare like Steve Winwood's "Back in the High Life Again" moved their hit-making operation to Nashville and pushed out anything resembling Willie Nelson and Townes Van Zant. So I can't evaluate the strengths of Swift in comparison to her peers. I'm not well equipped to compare her to other female pop stars. My experience there is lacking, too.  Is it better than Lady Gaga, Beyonce, Katy Perry, the new stinker from Liz Phair? I don't know. (Ok, actually, I think it may be better than Phair's new one, but that's not saying very much at all.)

What I can tell you is that, despite the promise of some Liz Phair-style confessionals, Speak Now is about as dangerous as a round of Candyland. In the much-chattered-about "Dear John" about Mayer, an infamous sleazeball if you believe what you read in People or see on TMZ,  is a softball of a "hate" song that admits nearly nothing. Instead, over some slow bloozy pop sleeper of a tune (it sounds like something Mayer might have crafted himself), Swift piles up a few unrelated metaphors before a chorus as unspecific as the most average piece of middle school poetry.

You painted a blue sky went back and turned it to rain
I played your chess game but you changed the rules every day
Wondering what version of you I might get on the phone tonight
I stopped picking up and this song is to let you know why
Dear John I see it all now that you're gone...
Don't you think I was too young to be messed with
The girl in the dress cried the whole way home....

If Mayer actually did anything to deserve the, um, mean song Swift penned for him, we're not going to know anything about it. Liz Phair's "Fuck and Run" this ain't.

The closest Swift comes to danger is on the country-rockin' "Better Than Revenge," in which she threatens to get back at a romantic rival. Aside from the sad fact that Swift falls right into the time-honored female tradition of reserving her most self-righteous fury for another girl, not the guy who really deserve it, "Better than Revenge" is hardly all that threatening. Again, she piles up some unrelated metaphors:

She's not a saint. She's not what you think. She's an actress.
She's better known for the things that she does on the mattress
Soon she's gonna find that stealing other people's toys on the playground won't make her any friends
She should keep in mind there's nothing I do better than revenge

So what's her plan? She mentions rhyming the name of the object of her scorn with some bad words (Oh, Snap!) but nothing else... The takeaway is that Swift knows this girl isn't as great as she think she is.  But it's hard to imagine Swift capable of anything more diabolical than writing a bad song about her foes and ex-flings. Unlike The best songwriters, especially those who worked in the old style of country music, Swift paints in broad strokes of vague emotions. Instead of the truth, we get a lot of feelings. That might be fine in middle school, but it doesn't make for compelling song craft.*

It's too bad really. The little girl might have lived a little but these aren't really fully formed songs of experience. Tellingly, perhaps to herself, on the song "Innocent," she sings "Who you are is not where you've been / You're still an innocent." So no. There's no Lindsay Lohan-slide into slut-dom in store for Swift, which is good, but there's also no sign that the biggest pop star in the country is grown up yet. But wait! There's even a song about that here. In "Never Grow Up," Swift admits to wishing she had never grown up and experienced any pain.  I have to say: mission accomplished.

* Footnote:
I know, this is a high bar to set. Pop music is largely about the general -- easy to relate to experiences that can be the soundtrack for teenagers everywhere. And she's also only, like 21 or something. I get it. I still think the point about the lyrics is a good one, particularly in regard to the music biz promise of real bite in a set of songs that are just as fluffy as her last batch of cotton candy. It's not a problem Madonna ever had, for example.