At some point, we have to recognize that even if you embrace the limits of pop music, the distance between middlebrow entertainment and the lowest common denominator is enormous. Our need for shared artistic connection cannot be allowed to overwhelm a duty to also collectively seek out music that takes us places and challenges us with insights into the human condition, revelations about ourselves we didn’t know (or maybe didn’t want to know), and otherwise produces insights into the problems of others. And I, for one, already know enough to know Taylor Swift just doesn’t have it in her to do that.

After Tayor Swift’s massive “Eras” tour is packing stadiums to the point her shows are causing earthquakes (even though bad seats are often going for $1,000 or more), Swift isn’t just resuscitating the post-Covid live music industry, she’s threatening to help rescue America’s flagging theater business.
It was recently announced that she struck a deal with AMC theaters to show a three-hour concert film from her smash tour for the millions of people who couldn’t get tickets. It starts showing in October, AMC is charging higher ticket prices than normal — which are already absurd — and the presale figures for the movie tickets are already breaking records. Based on some back-of-the-envelope math gleaned from some speculative news reports, Swift might make something close to half a billion dollars off this tour and all the related revenue.
And it’s not just that Swift has conquered the unwashed masses, America’s elite tastemakers have also become unrepentant Swifties. This summer, The New York Times covered Swift with an enthusiastic zeal not reserved for any other figure since maybe Obama — even going so far as to publish a distasteful meditation on internet randos’ lesbian fantasies about her.
Most recently, The New Yorker issued its high-toned blessing by publishing a remarkable essay, “Listening to Taylor Swift in Prison: Her music makes me feel that I’m still part of the world I left behind.” There was a time when we imagined that everyone in the prison yard would stand around overwhelmed by the sheer emotion and elevation of the soul produced by hearing “Sull’aria” from Mozart’s Le Nozze Di Figaro, even though they had no idea what those two Italian ladies were singing about. But if “Blank Space” is what you’ve got on the cheap commissary radio to help you count the days, I’m not going to begrudge you.
Still, someone who truly, deeply cares about the state of popular music has to stand athwart Taylor Swift, yelling “what is this @#?!,” and it might as well be an intellectually dyspeptic Gen X guy with nothing to lose.
To be clear, I’m not so hostile or out of touch that I don’t get important aspects of her appeal. I think she’s worth paying attention to because something about Swift resonates at the frequency of America. But I’m genuinely not sure her popularity is a testament to her talent, and I can’t think of another major post-WWII music figure I’m honestly this conflicted about estimating their gifts. Swift is a phenomenal marketer, she works very hard, and from what I can tell, almost no one at her level cares about her fans and reaching out to them personally the way Swift does.
Further, while a lot of positive developments came out of the internet destroying the cabal of corporate music executives and radio programmers that previously controlled popular tastes, we’re now coming to terms with how resulting fragmentation has been detrimental to society. We hardly have anything in the way of a shared common culture, so people tend to cling to anything that breaks through the din and consolidates any pop culture support like it’s some kind of life raft. Music has the power to connect people through shared experience, and people desperately want that connection in this polarizing age.
In the case of Swift, however, that connection has to be interpreted, like everything else these days, through a political lens. Thus New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg declares, “After years of Covid isolation, reactionary politics and a mental health crisis that has hit girls and young women particularly hard, there’s a palpable longing for both communal delight and catharsis.” While there’s some truth in this observation, I regret to inform Goldberg that Swift’s fanbase is so massive that a huge part of it agrees with the reactionary politics New York Times readers seem to deplore.
The best pop stars simply transcend pedestrian political concerns, explaining Swift’s appeal doesn’t have to be done through the lens of feminism. Six years ago — long before, say, the Dobbs decision or the New Right writing essays about “The Longhouse” — I observed after Tom Petty’s death, “a huge swath of America, across beliefs, cultures, generations, and races, would want to claim Tom Petty’s music and feel some solidarity in his loss. We need unifying cultural figures and artists now more than ever.” Petty was obviously very masculine and a baby boomer, but his massive appeal over several decades — at the time of his death, one out of every 40 songs played on classic rock radio was Tom Petty — and Swift’s appeal are both born of a universal desire for human connection.
The Rise of “Me Music”
What has changed is the overall cultural milieu that produced Swift, compared to popstars of previous generations and how they reflect changing values. Ironically enough, Tom Wolfe coined the phrase “the Me decade” to refer to the 1970s when artists such as Tom Petty rose to stardom. The idea was Americans were starting to move away from having an identity rooted in community and moving toward atomization — and certainly, a big part of that development was the ability for individuals to find meaning outside local communities and identify with distant pop culture figures whose identity and branding were created by relatively new mass media technologies.

But this development, however startling it was to astute critics such as Wolfe, was embryonic 50 years ago. With Taylor Swift we see it in full flower; maybe it took 30-some years, but the cultural trends that emerged from the ’70s finally produced an artist almost wholly dedicated to “Me Music.” This finally brings me to my actual gripe, the specifics of why and how her music sucks: It’s utterly defined by self-obsession rather than introspection. Where other artists will occasionally do a Christmas album, it seems like every Taylor Swift album is a Festivus record devoted to the airing of grievances and feats of artistic strength.

Read More
Related Posts:

Written by Christopher J. Gordon |
Thursday, June 15, 2023

Christians, be faithful and uncompromising in your witness, even unto death, remembering that Jesus told us to be of good cheer because He has overcome the world. The sexual revolution is no match for Him, for the battle has always belonged to the Lord.

When I first entered the ministry almost twenty years ago, I was a young, idealistic pastor ready to take on the world and to defend the Reformed doctrines of grace. Though I knew that Western culture over the past century was experiencing a radical change in the understanding of what it means to be human and how that plays out in our sexual ethics, I was not prepared for how quickly the sexual revolution would progress. Who of us entering the ministry in the early 2000s was prepared to face a sexual revolution that would overturn the God-ordained institution of marriage between a man and a woman? I felt more equipped to address the challenges that the Reformers faced from those who troubled the church from the inside on the important nuances of soteriology. It did not take long, however, before I as a pastor faced what seemed to be an insurmountable problem: the entire world’s demanding our submission to an unbiblical anthropology.
The Sexual Revolution
Ever since the Obergefell decision in 2015, when gay marriage was legalized in the United States, a flood of assaults have sought to overturn the creational sexual ethic that God established from the beginning for the good of the human race. We can no longer take it for granted that non-Christians around us agree on the basic definition of male and female. Our institutions have embraced concepts such as gender fluidity and call believers to declare their preferred pronouns and accept whatever view of gender is espoused by those around them. This is becoming no less true among historically robust Christian institutions as parents face sending their children to colleges that will actively seek to indoctrinate them with the new sexual libertinism. Homosexual behavior and premarital sex have for some time been normalized in the mainstream consciousness, and there seems to be no question that as we see the continual unraveling of all creational norms and the embrace of things that are contrary to nature, the next wave of sexual deviancy will demand the acceptance of nonmonogamous relationships and bestiality.
To this point, Christians have enjoyed, for the most part, marginal acceptance by society due to legal protections, but if things continue at their current rate, this time will soon be over. Full participation in the workplace and in wider society will require complete submission to whatever are the prevailing ideals of the moral revolution and the proposed reset of all creation norms.

While our freedoms still remain, we have already witnessed in the church a growing temptation to compromise on biblical anthropology and sexual ethics. Many of the ideologies of the culture have already found a place in many quarters of the Christian church in an attempt toward cultural acceptance. Movements such as Side B Christianity have attempted to forge a middle way by adopting an identity in unnatural desire, such as being a gay Christian, so long as the desires are not carried out.

Read More
Related Posts:

Second Timothy 3:16–17 calls us to handle the truths of Scripture in a way that results in a constant pattern of personal self-examination that leads to honest and humble confession, which produces a commitment to repentance, resulting in a life of increasing spiritual maturity and joyful obedience. Not just your thinking is being changed, but every area of your life is being brought into greater and greater conformity to the will of the one who created you and recreated you in Christ Jesus.

The Word is a Gift of Grace
The doctrines of the word of God were not intended just to lay claim on your brain, but also to capture your heart and transform the way you live. Those doctrines are meant to turn you inside out and your world upside down. Biblical doctrine is much more than an outline you give confessional assent to. Doctrine is something you live in even the smallest and most mundane moments of your life. Biblical doctrine is meant to transform your identity, alter your relationships, and reshape your finances. It’s meant to change the way you think and talk, how you approach your job, how you conduct yourself in time of leisure, how you act in your marriage, and the things you do as a parent. It’s meant to change the way you think about your past, interpret the present, and view the future.
The doctrines of the word of God are a beautiful gift to us from a God of amazing grace. They are not burdensome, life-constricting beliefs. No, they impart new life and new freedom. They quiet your soul and give courage to your heart. They make you wiser than you had the natural potential to be, and they replace your complaining heart with one that worships with joy. God unfolds these mysteries to you because he loves you. He is the giver of life, and every doctrine in his word plants seeds of life in your heart. And as those seeds take root and grow, you too grow and change.
God isn’t just after your mind; he’s after your heart. And he’s not just after your heart; he’s after everything that makes up you. His truths (doctrines) are the ecosystem in which the garden of personal transformation grows.
No passage captures this better than 2 Timothy 3:16–17: “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” This passage is so important for understanding how the truths (doctrines) of Scripture are meant to function in our lives. It gives us not only four ways that Scripture (and each of its doctrines) is meant to function in our lives but, more importantly, it provides a process by which Scripture is meant to function. Here are the four steps in the process.
1. Teaching: The Standard.
The truths of the Bible are God’s ultimate standard. They establish for us who God is, who we are, what our lives were designed to be, what is true and what is not, why we do the things we do, how change takes place, what in the world has gone wrong, and how in the world it will ever get corrected.
Read More