Authenticity, Iyaz and Taylor Swift (February 9, 2010)

My iPod has died.

Technically, it still lives on, but it only holds a battery charge of about sixty seconds. This isn't enough for most songs. It certainly isn't enough for hourlong commutes, commutes that I take more and more often these days in search of jobs and classes and new horizons. For a while I was carting my CDs around, like some kind of silver lunches, but this quickly got tiresome. What's a girl to do? Well, there's always the radio.

The radio; that place where I spent my childhood listening, acquiring a taste for early Max Martin (whatever prompted his current ludicrosity, I will never know) and musical spun sugar. My tastes have veered off in all manner of directions -- rococo, angry, chill -- but this is always what the foundation was. So it's strange how natural it all seemed, how little time it took to assimilate myself back into the feed.

That doesn't sound very pleasant, right? This is the other part of a commute. You're alone. They call radio the most intimate medium for this very reason. But when you're alone, you do have time to think, and analyze, and overanalyze, and I've built up quite a backlog of such thoughts and reactions over the past months.

And now I will present them to you.

A few notes:

- I am both female and not too far removed from the target demographic of much of what I write about. I bring this up because older people or men or especially older men write about this stuff, Whether or not you think this is an issue, it is absent with me.

- I am as liberal as they come. My heart stopped bleeding a long time ago and is now a vampired husk, kind of like those vegetables in Bunnicula. So you can be pretty assured that what you're going to read here is biased as all hell.

- I criticize. A lot. I criticize for things that are the song's fault, as well as things that are not. Do not mistake this for not being a fan or not enjoying things. True fandom, after all, should allow for criticism and not just be blind gushing adoration for crap and gold alike. I'll tell you what I dislike, believe me.

- I tend to get hyper-personal, idiosyncratic, etc. at times. These trains of thought have been running without you. They've collected their own vocabulary sometimes, Katamari-style, but I figure it's better than a constant drip of pop language.

- At first, these reactions might be a bit behind. As I said, backlog.

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So, without further ado, our first issue: Authenticity. I don't think it's much of a stretch to say that a good deal of pop music these days is confessional, or purports to be. The singer talks about his or her life, and the kids presumably connect it with their own lives, and all is hunky-dory.

Doesn't really work out that way, a lot of the time. Putting aside the obvious objection that their lives, in all probability, look nothing like yours, a lot of what I hear about how, say, high school works bears little or no resemblance to reality. Not even in the idealized "BEST PARTY EVER! WORST CLASS EVER! TEACHERS ARE BORING!" sense, but something else. Teen movies do this all the time. YA fiction, too. You'd think every high school was allotted one pretty blonde queen-bee cheerleader to scoff at clearly delineated subcultures. But that's just not how it is.

And it's all very disconcerting to someone who's actually grown up in the Real World. At least Miley Cyrus admitted her song was just a shill for her Wal-Mart line and perhaps people indeed wear stilettos to Nashville parties. But what about these two?

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Iyaz - Replay

This song is everywhere. I can't escape it. So perhaps I am going to be a bit biased about it coming in, because it has far, far, far outstayed its welcome in my opinion.

The thing is, this song positions itself as "with it" -- the chorus might as well be an Apple publicity stunt, not that they need it when their latest product is a nationwide menstrual joke.

Do meet-cutes really happen at the mall these days, especially with friends around? ("Do meet-cutes really happen?" could be a point in itself, but eh.) Do teenage guys really lust after posters these days when they can go online and see even scantier pictures for free? (Flo Rida's single had the same problem, although I guess "that body belongs on a JPEG surreptitiously stashed away inside fifteen nested folders" doesn't scan as well.) The iPod function isn't even called "replay," anyway.

I really can't say much about this song, because it just isn't that interesting. So on we move to....

Taylor Swift - Fifteen

Yes, that's right, I'm going to fucking criticize a Taylor Swift song. Now please stop your Paul Ballarding and let me finish.

My sister was listening to this song a few months before it hit the radio. She said it was her favorite song and that she really related to it. I can't imagine how. Well, no, that's not entirely accurate. I can.

Riese from AutoStraddle got to most of these points before I did, but I think it's still worth saying. (There are a few items in there I don't entirely agree with -- for instance, I don't think Lady Gaga is as transgressive as the article says she is -- but that's a topic for another post.)

See, Taylor Swift's image just does not work. It doesn't matter so much who's responsible for her image -- there, I deflected all your "but she's just talking about her own experiences!" critiques, but read on -- "I'm not a princess, this ain't a fairy tale," she sings in her latest single, and while this would sound believable coming from a Kelly Clarkson, a Pink, hell, even a Sara Lumholdt, it's completely unbelievable from her. See, this is her entire image. Taylor Swift is the princess of good white Christian girls who wait, girls who think cheerleaders are way too sexy with their short skirts and their hip hop routines.

And there you have the other unfortunate aspect of Taylor Swift's appeal, as well as the appeal of the pop-country revival in general. It's perceived as a realm free of hip hop influence -- free of black influence, in other words -- and therefore acceptable to those still latently pissy that they don't get to have their fake Gone with the Wind society that never existed. I mean, Lady Antebellum, people! I don't believe for a second that this was just a tossed-off name -- even if that's how the band came up with it, some marketing executive out there knew all this and ran with it.

All this played out pretty visibly with the Kanye West incident. As ugly as the whole thing was, it's hard to deny the uncomfortable racial dynamics -- society goes into an uproar after a black man "forgets his place" and slights the oh-so-troubled white woman -- and if you're the type to dismiss that sort of analysis right off the bat, the image macros set it out plainly. Hell, you don't even need a macro; just look at the undoctored pictures and there's Poor Usurped Taylor in her glowy backlit whiteness. The fact that there has not been more commentary like this frankly scares me.

What does any of this have to do with "Fifteen"?

Well, the Good Christian Girls and their handlers are always on the lookout for radio songs they can actually listen to without telling their middle-school pledges how guilty they are for sinning like that. (I speak from experience; I did my time in high school youth group. "Since U Been Gone" passed the muster; "Unwritten" was popular enough to get performed by the praise band (the fact that it was more Romanticist than theological didn't seem to occur to them.) Safe songs. Unthreatening songs. Idealized.

"Fifteen" fits the bill perfectly -- is the lyrical equivalent of the Barnum Effect: nice platitudes that can technically apply to anyone because of how generic and inoffensive they are.

Let's start from the beginning.

- You take a deep breath and walk through the doors of your high school like a frightened doe. OK, fine, except that most 15-year-olds listening have already done this in public elementary school, and public middle school; it's not a big deal. It wasn't for me, after all.

- By high school, it's fairly common knowledge that most senior boys who'd be willing to date a freshman are not exactly prime dating material. They're sketchy. It's also fairly common knowledge that freshman girls who'd be willing to date senior boys tend to get bad reputations. I'm not endorsing this, but it happens.

- You're on your first date and you're just so stunned that your boyfriend has a car, OMG! Yeah, except that 15 is the learner's permit age in most areas. Even before that, most kids have driven their parents' and friends' cars surreptitiously in parking lots -- hell, some have even driven them after a few cheap beers. It's like being shocked that your boyfriend has a cell phone. Do people seriously still do this?

- Then there's the issue of that one line about Abigail giving up "all she had." Defenders of the song say it doesn't HAVE to refer to her virginity, that only angry feminists think that. But come on, people. This is exactly how teens are going to take the line. My sister interpreted it that way, for instance. And if one anecdotal girl isn't enough, how about some people on Songmeanings (frequented by teens)?

"also she mentions how her friend abigail loses her virginity to a guy that "changed his mind" and they both cried b/c she probably regretted it." -bncx10

"Then Abigail gave her heart (and possibly her virginity) to a boy who "changed his mind" and they both cried." -angill973

"like it implies abigal gave up her viriginity, thats what it sounds like to me, then they move on." -sweetness_88 (Wonder how old she is?)

"i agree with what everyone has said about "abigail", sex is something girls my age get caught up in & most regret it." -manderrrkins175

"Abigail that dumb Broad... I can say this about her she would make one terrible car salesman, you see say she had a New ferrari and what she would do is give the car away before the guy payed well he drives off and he "changes his mind" on paying." -heeminhyman (with bonus slut-shaming fail!)

I'm not even cherry-picking here. These were the first replies. This is how most people are interpreting the line. So it doesn't matter what Taylor meant. Death of the author. What matters is the message that's getting out. 'Cause when you're 15, you tend to interpret a lot of things about sex. Hell, I was doing it at age 11.

I think what bugs me the most is the constant "you're" spattered throughout the song. Taylor, you don't speak for me; when I was 15, my life looked nothing like your platitudes. And I'm sure there are legions of 15-year-olds out there, past, present and future, who can say the same thing.