Posted on 05/23/2015 11:50:45 AM PDT by drewh
Over the last few years, Taylor Swift has become one of the two or three biggest pop stars in the world. She has accumulated no fewer than four homes (including a $3.5 million place in Beverly Hills and a $20 million Tribeca penthouse) and drawn enormous press and media attention. She’s still on the cover of lots of magazines and we’ll probably see her there far into the future.
On its release last year, her “1989” record became the biggest selling album in more than a decade, at a time in which record sales have been way down. She became, according to Business Insider, “the first woman to have three albums sell more than 1 million copies in a single week.” The album has now sold more than 4 million – the kind of number we thought, in the age of file-sharing, we’d never hear again.
Swift’s current tour will take her to stadiums all over the world, including Metlife Stadium in New Jersey, capacity 82,600. Her net worth is roughly $200 million – that’s about 3,550 times the median net worth of an American household. By every available measure, she seems to be doing pretty well, and at 25, she’s probably just getting started with her world domination.
But to the New York Times, she is, apparently, an “underdog.” The paper of record used the term twice in its review of her show in a relatively intimate 13,000-seat arena in Louisiana and pulled it out for the headline as well: “On Taylor Swift’s ‘1989’ Tour, the Underdog Emerges as Cool Kid.”
Well, Taylor Swift may be a lot of things, but we’re not really sure “underdog” is one of them. Let’s back up a little bit.
Like a lot of country singers – that’s how she first broke in – Taylor Swift grew up on a farm. It wasn’t a subsistence farm in the rough part of Kentucky but a Christmas-tree farm in Pennsylvania. “Her mother worked in finance,” a New Yorker story says, “and her father, a descendant of three generations of bank presidents, is a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch. (He bought the tree farm from a client.)” In Swift’s hometown, she told the magazine’s Lizzie Widdicombe, “it mattered what kind of designer handbag you brought to school.”
So let’s acknowledge that she began life with a slight leg up on the privilege escalator. But the playing field is about a get a lot less level: “When she was ten, her mother began driving her around on weekends to sing at karaoke competitions,” the New Yorker tells us. “Then she persuaded her mother to take her to Nashville during spring break to drop off her karaoke demo tapes around Music Row, in search of a record deal; they didn’t succeed, but the experience convinced Swift that she needed a way to stand out.”
When Swift was 14, her father relocated to Merrill Lynch’s Nashville office as a way to help dear Taylor break into country music. As a sophomore in high school, she got a convertible Lexus. Around the same time, her dad bought a piece of Big Machine, the label to which Swift signed.
This is hardly the first case of stage parents or a rich kid breaking into the music world. And along the way, Swift has worked hard, behaved reasonably nicely, and so on. But why are we describing her as someone who’s triumphed over adversity?
Part of this is because of a critical/journalist school that worships money, popularity and fame: Unlike previous generations of critics, or the traditional journalistic mission to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” Poptimists like the New York Times’ Jon Caramanica don’t buy the old small-is-beautiful premise. And what better way to reconcile the contradiction – to inject a bit of rebel cool into the story – than to make a millionaire daughter of the plutocracy into an underdog?
Specifically, the review refers to a much-quoted song, “We are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” which is about her relationship with one or another celebrity actor or singer or Jonas Brother. Here’s Caramanica:
In the song, she’s lashing out at a dunderheaded ex: “You would hide away and find your peace of mind/ With some indie record that’s much cooler than mine.”
Indie rock – and punk and alt-country, and left-of-the-dial R&B and related genres that are uncomfortable with corporations or consumerism – is exactly the kind of thing an offspring of Wall Street like Taylor Swift is not going to respond to. So does her dissing a celebrity ex make her into an underdog? To a poptimist, maybe.
But this kind of thing is especially offensive since there have actually been plenty of musicians who really were underdogs.
Johnny Cash was raised by poor cotton farmers during the Great Depression. John Lennon’s mother and father abandoned him. Jimi Hendrix’s early life was a nightmare that involved shoplifting food so he could eat. For decades, the average blues and country musician came from poverty or close to it. Billie Holiday was jailed, as a teenager, for prostitution. And so on.
And even for the musicians raised middle-class – many were – a life in music has involved real risk and suffering. The punk band the Mekons has bounced up and down, from label to label, for decades. Jason Molina, who made transcendent records on tiny labels with Magnolia Electric Company until alcoholism took him down two years ago, never found a substantial audience. Chan Marshall of Cat Power recently filed for bankruptcy. In a post-label world where piracy has shredded artist’s earnings, just about everyone trying to play music professionally below the superstar label could be considered an underdog.
Somebody should tell the New York Times: Just because the Jack Black character in “High Fidelity” doesn’t think you’re cool doesn’t mean you’re an underdog. He doesn’t call the shots anymore, and really, he never did.
Scott Timberg is a staff writer for Salon, focusing on culture. A longtime arts reporter in Los Angeles who has contributed to the New York Times, he runs the blog Culture Crash. He's the author of the new book, "Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class."
You read that out of a book? You are familiar with Tour Support correct? It’s what you paid your rent with for the first three years you spent on the road. It wasn’t part of your advance. Does tour support exist now? No, it doesn’t.
Tour support is what we gave our wives/girlfriends every time we told them we had to go back out. What you know is the dorm room bong hit story of how the music business worked and there is no arguing with your vast knowledge. You are a joke.
At Taft HS in Chicago teacher’s openly teach that being white makes you bad and the cause of most of the harm in the world. Mexicans come here because Americans destroyed Mexico and left it a wasteland. The Founders were racists and misogynists. Lincoln hated black people and the Civil War was fought over owning slaves, not free them.
When the race riots hit and people start Reginald Dennying whites just for being whites, this will be the cause. It’s all propaganda all the time and the goal is perpetual grievance. It’s pure evil and the Devil is laughing.
Because the press just doesn’t pay enough attention to Taylor Swift.
More than 99% of bands are going to struggle and will never make it to the big time.
I played Little League ball but never made the pros. But I moved on and didn't feel bitter about it.
Who are you trying to fool here?
I read where her new best friend is the skank Lena Dunham who has convinced Taylor that all men are woman haters.
Fooling no one. I am bitter, very bitter. But like I said up thread, only as a consumer, not as a former player. The farm teams have been decimated by the “new” distro model. Less and less are taking the leap and really trying to do it compared to years past, because there is nothing to make. Even on the smallest of levels. Sure everyone can put out a record, but there is no fire to forge them. It’s just dying on the vine. It’s sad to me.
Now when, Hollywood and its multi-million dollar investments start to equal a paltry return, people will notice the drop in product quality and the Fed will step in. Can’t wait to sit back and laugh then.
So Taylor was reared in a wealthy not a coal-mining family and this means she can’t make music, Salon?
It helps explain why an awkward kid with no talent made it big in show business.
Even if you had an album on tape, the packing of the album (artwork, lyrics, etc.) still made it worthwhile to purchase an album.
“Kellie Pickler”
I had to look that one up. I don’t know much about Country unless it’s been around forever.
Coming from money can give musicians a lot of free time to practice and access to good instruments, but it’s not going to give them talent. Not that talent seems to be required for a lot of performers...
I heard that Taylor Swift is hanging around with Lena Dunham.
And in the news today:
Art Garfunkel On Paul Simon: I 'Created A Monster'
About Taylor Swift, sure there's envy. But also, there's a suspicion that she's not all she claims to be. Maybe that's envy, too, but maybe it will turn out to be true.
Sorry to hear that, and I know what you mean. She didn’t seem a real athletic person in the couple of short videos I’ve seen.
That’s fine with me. To each their own.
= :^)
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