Swift sales show that 'enemy of feminism' Taylor means business revolver on music
IT'S THE biggest story of the year in terms of music sales and no one wants to know: Taylor Swift's Speak Nowalbum sold more than a million copies in the US alone in the first week of its release at the end of October.
Post-Napster, those sorts of figures weren't supposed to happen any more. One in every five albums bought in the US that week was Speak Now. Swift outsold the next 62 albums on the chart put together – something else that has never happened before.
The album was only on release for 58 minutes before it topped the iTunes chart. Swift has sold 2½ million individual downloads from the album, which means that each of the 14 tracks are in the singles charts. Factor in her age – she’s only 20 – and the fact she wrote the entire album herself and you’re looking at popular music records that have stood since Elvis, The Beatles and Michael Jackson being shattered all over the place.
And this is no one-off. Her last album, 2008's Fearlesswon four Grammys, including the biggest prize in music – the Grammy for album of the year. And she's getting some decent reviews as well, with two publications not known for their endorsement of mainstream country-pop (Rolling Stone and the New York Times) both going into superlative speak. The latter noting, rather curiously, that Swift is "a country-pop Jane Austen".
In Ireland the new album has already gone gold, the last one went a few times platinum and her show at the 02 next March sold out in minutes. A 20-year-old female who writes her own material and
is reshaping the popular music history books – it’s quite something. But for the “male gaze” of the media she’s the wrong sort of female.
Swift can’t be corralled into the nymph/whore boxes. And, gasp, she’s “an enemy of feminism”. In a world gone Gaga, Swift is pilloried
for letting the side down. She’s not “complex”, “damaged” and doesn’t score too highly on the “subversion” index.
“The rush to exalt Swift is, I believe, a desperate attempt to infuse our . . . country . . . with a palatable conservative ideology in the form of a complacent, repressed feminine ideal.
an established/ evolved talent (Beyoncé) or a revolutionary (Lady Gaga). According to her lyrics, she has spent her entire life waiting for phone calls and dreaming about horses and sunsets,” runs one of the many negative online opinions.
Elsewhere, Swift gets compared to Bristol Palin (whatever that’s supposed to imply) and derided for being a “celebuteen”. Her runaway commercial success attributed to “good marketing”.
And where once-concerned parents pored over the lyrics of metal bands or gangsta rappers to find proof of society coming apart at the seams, now their mirror counterparts are poring over Swift’s lyrics to uncover their “hidden meaning”. Yes, Swift’s entire lyrical reach might not extend past “walking in the rain with my boyfriend” but to put her beside Janis Joplin for a compare/ contrast rant seems harsh, to say the least.
The core problem here appears to be that her Dan Brown/JK Rowling-like sales are putting her up into a pretty exalted position in the music world and that she’s just a bit too much of a wide-eyed, know-nothing, uncool ingénue to warrant that elevation. For an Amy or a Gaga that’s all fine – there’s a whiff of cordite there – but for someone who makes
The Jonas Brothers look like Megadeth, it’s just dreadfully untweetable.
But at the business end of the argument you’re looking at a situation where a number of big-name acts are deliberately releasing their albums in the immediate wake of Swift’s Speak Now just so they can take advantage of the footfall in record shops.
She may well be “a feminist nightmare”, but Taylor Swift still a 20-year-old woman who writes all her own material, breaking new ground, raising the bar and leaving the musically correct wringing their hands in anguish.
