The other day, a friend who’d seen a Zoom talk asked if I’d seen it too. And I’d been curious. But, unhip to the sound of Taylor Swift, the talk’s subject, I’d had a listen on YouTube. Ugh. Swift left me cold and I told my friend as much. Insisting I’d missed out, my friend, whose musical taste I respect, gushed that Tay was so authentic, her songs so personal etc. Uh-huh? I resolved to read some lyrics (it couldn’t hurt more than hearing them sung) and began with a random if representative sampling. Much of which sounded vaguely familiar…

world keeps spinning (from a 1970 song by Glen Campbell)
crazy for you (a 1985 song by Madonna)
madly in love (a 1990 song by Bros)
stolen kisses (a 2005 song by Psychic TV)
pretty lies (from a 1971 song by Joni Mitchell)
the worst is yet to come (a WWI-era song)
gonna be alright (from a 1977 song by Bob Marley and the Wailers)
never miss a beat (a 2008 song by Kaiser Chiefs)
lost in translation (a 2003 film by Sofia Coppola)
running scared (a 1961 song by Roy Orbison)
cried like a baby (a 1971 song by Bobby Sherman)
seal my fate (a 1995 song by Belly)
then you walked away (a 2005 song by The Shanes)
save it for a rainy day (a 1976 song by Stephen Bishop)

And all from just four songs (three co-written), among other cliches:

make the tables turn
take this way too far
leave you breathless
wide-eyed gaze
wind in my hair
everything to me
feeling so alone
cut to the bone

I googled some more. A billionaire at thirty-five, Tay employs an army of staff to manage her image, career and fan outreach. Yet suffering over her image surfaces as a theme in her lyrics: ‘I search the party of better bodies’ and, from the same song, ‘I hosted parties and starved my body’. (She used to be a model.) Hardly deathless lyrics, but they’re honest (if elliptical). I pushed on. And in the course of exploring – having read more lyrics and watched some clips – just how a mediocre artist achieved such fame, I saw she’d written and directed a film to much acclaim, and since All Too Well: The Short Film, at just fifteen minutes, lives up to its name, I watched it. A clip for her song ‘All Too Well’, it features a dramatised scene of a pretty teen reproaching her thirtyish beau. I waited for revelations that he’d hit or abused or betrayed her – more grounds for her tanty than his ignoring her while catching up with his friends – but no. He acts aloof, but she’s passive-aggressive and Swift’s evasive lyrics leave room for interpretation (based on your own personal history). Yet the age gap is implicated. Hmm. At that girl’s age I dated high-profile middle-aged men and sometimes felt left out of conversations yet didn’t expect to have my hand held nonstop. So the scene felt like a storm in a taycup to me. Is Swift in fact less vulnerable than self-obsessed or self-indulgent?

However, I’m currently reading Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who survived years of internment in Nazi death camps. Frankl puts torment in perspective:

Agreed. So if I’d been deprived of music to rival even so-so last-century pop, I might admire an artist who appears to wear her heart on her sleeve. Not unlike how Princess Diana inspired passionate fandom by virtue of being, if no less spoilt, more relatable than most royals. Was Di authentic? Many thought so. Having paid her no mind until she died, I’ve since seen docos that expose her manipulative side. Would Frankl tell us that contrivance is absolutely relative?

Much has been written on Swift’s cultural impact; much said about her archetypal relevance. Yet isn’t she just a symptom? An all-American, bright-blue-eyed white girl next door with her own private jet, a rack of awards and lavish parental support, yet hung up on hetero-cis romance that doesn’t survive the honeymoon, aptly personifies the excesses of capitalism.

And maybe Swift has a gift for amping up the significance of events in her emotional life – a tendency that typifies our society. Take her song ‘Cassandra’. Supposedly the lyrics refer to an accusation that Swift had lied when she’d been telling the truth. At length she was vindicated. But riding out the digital tide of adverse public opinion had to be hard for an it’s-all-good girl who lives like a princess. So she sings of not being believed. Yet the mythic Cassandra, a real princess, possessed prophetic powers and spoke of the future, not the past. Swift fails to grasp, let alone evoke, the archetype, so her song just sounds histrionic.

So what exactly is authenticity, apart from a brand enhancer and, often, a hot-button topic in a world from which the immediacy of anything real has receded, displaced by cascading layers of tech-driven simulation? Well, Swift makes music, whatever its merits or lack thereof, so any consideration of her realness should surely include it. After all, at least part of my bored indifference to Swift-as-artist exists because she sounds so overproduced she could be AI-generated. And so, after skimming scads of conflicting opinions re whether or not she’s ‘authentic’, I turned to her 2019 Tiny Desk Concert: a 29-minute stripped-down live performance in an intimate setting that promptly demystifies the phenomenon.

Not unpredictably, Tay-Tay comes across as a blandly inoffensive, chirpy blonde with less natural vocal talent than most struggling local artists I know. The star so many mythologise is a methodically curated product. Fans may claim her inspiring example or championing of a range of social and political issues has changed things, and that her style and approach have reshaped the cultural landscape, but she and her kind exist to gain from the middle-class capitalist system that reigns, with the consequence that countless more skilled, brilliant and original artists who lack loaded parents as backers, high-powered support teams and lucrative record deals have been deprived of their livelihoods by exploitative online business models. Frankl died a free man not long before Big Tech divided and conquered the West. But AI Overview will tell you that authenticity is relative.