Usually on my way home from SF, I'll drive by an Olive Garden restaurant that's close to my house. By the cars overflowing in the parking lot, I know it's always packed. Call me dense, but I'm always amazed that it's always packed. I've never been inside. But I did eat in an Olive Garden on the road once. It was dreadful. Awful food. Cheesy ambience. I've never felt a need to go back to one.
Not to beat my head against the wall, but almost every time I pass my local Olive Garden I think, "There are a half dozen restaurants two blocks away, locally owned, all of them with better food than this. Why on Earth are people eating here?"
The answer is that of course I don't get it. People like the fact that they can get something predictable in a middle America kind of setting. They don't want to go to restaurants that are unknown where the owner and waiting staff speak with heavy foreign accents. They don't want adventure. They want comfort. And here's where my inner snob really comes out: they don't even know what good food is.
The Olive Garden does great because it delivers what people want. They've done their mass market surveys I'm sure. They know how much sugar the public wants in everything. They know price points. They probably even know what textures people prefer against their tongues.
I say this because I just listened to a CD by a girl named Taylor Swift called Fearless. I sandwiched listening to it between two wonderful pieces of music by two young and great jazz musicians, Anat Cohen and Christian Scott. That's not fair I know. But it was the only way I was going to get through Fearless. I could insert some joke here about the inappropriateness of the name of the CD, but I won't.
Taylor Swift is to music what the Olive Garden is to food. I'm sure her record will sell millions. It may even be the biggest seller of the music year. In a way it's brilliant as I'll get to later. But like visiting the Olive Garden, once is enough. I don't have a need to listen to it again.
I've heard Taylor Swift sing live. She can't. She has poor pitch control. She has limited range. She can barely play guitar. But she is a tall glass of water with long blonde hair. And I will tell you this much. She may be only 18, but she has a command of the stage that tells me she's been singing in front of crowds for a long, long time.
The mass market for music is a funny thing. The music is always dreadful to my ears. The melodies are predictable. The lyrics are trite. Most of the people performing have little musical talent. The last point doesn't seem to matter. But my guess is that the predictability and triteness of the music are actually virtues in terms of mass market appeal. Music that is as boring and irritating to me as hearing my toaster oven rattle every time I toast my bagel in the morning is comfort music to the mass market.
The formula for success in pop music is to be very predictable, and to package that predictability in some young thing that's attractive with a winning personality. This is what Madonna understood many many years ago (and amazingly it still works for her decades later). It's what Britney Spears' handlers understood (and still works for her a decade later). It's what Avril Lavigne understands, too (and I imagine she'll last awhile).
When I saw Taylor Swift perform, I thought of those three performers: Madonna, Spears and Lavigne. None of them can sing. All three of them are blonde most of the time. They all seem to have personalities that their fans adore. Music isn't what they are about. Image is.
Taylor Swift is different than those three in one way: she's a country music performer. But the boundaries between country and pop have blurred. And the brilliance of Taylor Swift is in marketing. She's the first kiddie pop performer ever in country music.
I'm surprised no one thought of this before. High school girls still buy music, lots of it. They and soccer moms are the last CD and mp3 buying demographic groups left. Heretofore, country music focused on the soccer mom. Everyone who sang was designed to appeal to them, thirty to forty something year old women. The funny thing about this approach is that even 18 year old kids like Blaine Larsen were forced by country music conventions to sound like they were in their thirties. They waxed nostalgically about the good times they had when they were young. It was silly.
Taylor Swift ignores the "sing older than you are" convention completely. She sings about high school relationships, boy trouble and the like. Because she can't really sing - her range is only a little better than an octave - she defies another convention of both country and pop music. Her choruses don't lift. They stay right down in the same musical range as her verses. Sometimes there is a rhythmic change to make the chorus separate from the verse, sometimes not. It's just talky, sing song, monotonous stuff. She's the country equivalent of Avril Lavigne that way. I'm sure she'll sell millions.
One thing that's strange about the pop music world is that reviews from the press rarely concern themselves with critical assessment of music. Instead they focus on their judgment of a record's mass appeal. For instance, if I were a press reviewer listening to this stuff, I'd say something along the lines that Fearless by Taylor Swift is a surefire hit album bound to appeal to teenage girls across the country. Not surprisingly, the reviews from Billboard, Entertainment Weekly, Blender, and Rolling Stone have been very positive. Even the New Yorker has called Taylor Swift a "prodigy." Oy vey.
I can't listen to this stuff. I can't eat at the Olive Garden either. They're all about mass market appeal. For me, if Taylor Swift, Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, and Avril Lavigne et al. would contract permanent laryngitis, this world would be a better place. Want some good music? Listen here to some Anat Cohen. Why on Earth would anyone want to listen to pop when you can hear this? That's a rhetorical question, by the way. Anat Cohen is indeed Fearless. Taylor Swift. Um no.
Sorry, I couldn't resist jabbing at the title of Taylor Swift's new CD. I just couldn't.
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