Taylor Swift, her music is the new phase of pop

First let’s dispel a myth: those who these days complain that they have never heard, or do not know, even a piece of Taylor Swiftwell, he’s lying. Unless he lives on Mars, it’s impossible not to know the tunes of world hits like Shake it off (2014) and Look what you made me do (2017), deliberately frivolous spearheads of a more varied and dense repertoire, with ballads and the rest.

The point is that this does not mean that, up to a certain point, those who claim to ignore it are acting in bad faith: they have a discreet charmSwift, does not have a face or a behavior that breaks the screen in the traditional sense, she is not provocative, it’s not hyper-sexualized; so to those who are used to reasoning in old categories of thought ‒ up to now, of course, from the concerts in Milan onwards the media storm has also been unleashed in Italy ‒ she may seem like an anonymous, negligible pop star. Obviously she is not, and if on the one hand this split tells the generational scope of the phenomenon, as if it comes from the future, on the other hand the numbers (economic, sales, marketing and concert tickets: the nursery rhyme is known) testify to something exceptional regardless.

By the way, often admitting that you don’t know even a piece is the antechamber of a discredit more generally, from the indignation of seeing her in eighth place in a list of the best guitarists of the last twenty years ‒ drawn up by the instrument sales magazine guitar guitarnot from the Bible, and if it had not been for Swift’s presence, perhaps no one would have spoken about it ‒ and a little bit also for misogyny. But anyway, okay, his records are part of a larger narrative and all that, but the fact remains that playing for the sceptre with Bealtes and Elvis Presleyin terms of entertainment and impact on popular culture, means that it is not ‒ it can not be ‒ one of the plastic products that we have learned to know in these fifty years. And at the core, despite various red herrings, there are always and in any case the songs.

That may not be liked, and that’s fine, but that for ambitions, structure, research and the rest they are not ‒ or they are no more ‒ bits and pieces from whatever. Swift has nothing to do with the pop stars we know, except in the American way of conceiving mega shows with choreography and the rest; it is differentstarting from the songs he writes in the first person, and arriving at the evolution he had in eleven studio albums. Perhaps one of the barriers, here, is the tonguebecause part of the talent is in the texts which, it has been said, are singer-songwriterswith architraves ‒ her, her friends, her antagonists (her exes) ‒ which enhance the ability to construct a broad story and build connected worlds and, on the other hand, to create a sort of great intimate and collective novel where anyone who comes across it can see themselves again.

It is also clear that, moreover, she is among the few who believe in traditional album format ‒ while many colleagues, even older ones, have surrendered to fluidity: in the face of Swift who spits on History ‒ all this was evident from the first works where she reread the country in a personal way, putting in stories of any teenage girl. In itself, it was a miracle to have collected incredible numbers outside the United States, as it was, if you consider that it is a genre that never crosses borders. In addition, on the sidelines, after a huge lawsuit related to the rights of those songs, for years she has been recording them again in her own way (the fateful Taylor’s version), destroying any comparison with the originals and demonstrating how he knows how to do it also in terms of production, mix and everything else, as well as artistic growth. But these, obviously, are aspects nerd which the general public doesn’t even pay attention to.

Exactly, the growth. There is no record, among those he has recorded, that is similar to the previous ones. So, as it is true that of the country Today, the writing style and a certain souvenir aesthetic remain, with cowboy boots and hats that anyone who was in Milan will have seen everywhere, with 1989 (2014) had given herself to theelectro-popopening up to an even wider audience thanks to the same Shake it off (2014) and Look what you made me do (2017). Here: if there was still any doubt about the uniqueness of the project, since 2020 the card of the definitive leap into orbit with disks has been played ‒ in order: Folklore, Evermore And Midnights ‒ who fish from theindie folkfrom the electronic and experimental music and from thealternativewritten with two indie rock guru as Aaron Dessner of The National And Jack Antonoff of Bleachers.

Their contribution made it possible for the criticismwho esteems them, began to take Swift’s albums seriously: but the association is not always mechanical, and the fact that those works ended up at the top of many popularity charts is an indication of success everywhere, of a pop that knows how to fill stadiums and at the same time does not want to settle, but to add depth. In the same way, it was not a given that by complicating the recipe the success would have remained the same, or even expanded. The last The Tortured Poets Department (2024), then, written with another alternative elite like Tame Impala and based on a synth pop the eightiesparadoxically, it didn’t even surprise anyone for its nature so different from classic pop, given that for Swift it’s now a status quo. Just like her talent in setting up melodie by now anything but banal, with harmonic and metric interlockings that are not obvious for pop.

Of course, we are talking about pop music, it is obvious that her talent lies in having opened the boundaries of the stadium genre and in knowing how to communicate to so many people ‒ and, really, in this she plays in a league apart from almost all the other pop stars: she cannot be underestimated ‒ rather than in experimenting in particularly courageous revolutions. The charts, finally, always leave the time they find: taking for granted, here too, that she is anything but an amateur with the guitar, which means being a great guitarist? Being a virtuoso (this is not the case, but it is not the case of many others) or knowing how to transmit something through the instrument, a discipline in which he excels? Then, of course, it will not have a seminal impact like that of a Lennon-McCartney, but it is precisely carrying forward these comparisons, as with the lists themselves, that fuels misleading discourses. pop in a broad sense, with Swift, it’s changingand that’s what matters. To those who say that “real music” is elsewhere, it must be said that here, beyond the prejudices of genres, of «real music» there is, indeed. And if you don’t know a single note of it, really, it’s time to fix that.