Are Artists That Appeal to 10 Year Olds Serious Artists?

 The Juniors of GCE Lab School have spent the past several weeks of time in our humanities class, the Art of Rhetoric, on a unit that was called Challenge. We met with Alderman Byron Sigcho-Lopez, Deputy Committeeperson/Chair of the 25th ward's independent political organization Ugo Okere, and the Executive Director of Sunshine Gospel Ministries Joel Hamernick. We discussed how they use language to convince others of their points, and the importance for speaking out for your beliefs. We researched op-eds, and chose a topic that was important to us to write an op-ed about. I chose to write mine about the way that media associated with teenaged girls is widely criticized with little basis beyond its fanbase. I did a lot of research to write this piece, and I learned much more about this topic than I originally knew. I had a great time writing this op-ed, and I hope it's an interesting read.

Mary McCartney, Rolling Stone, October 2020

    In the comments section of Slate article "Why Doesn't Pitchfork Review Artists Like Taylor Swift (Unless They're Covered By Ryan Adams)?" many commenters fervently refute the articles premise, and list reasons that Swift shouldn't be reviewed by serious music critiquing outlets. The arguments are best and most succinctly summarized by Slate user fdog9, who says that their young nieces love Taylor Swift, but asks rhetorically "are artists that appeal to 10 year olds serious artists?" No one could make a reasonable argument that Taylor Swift isn’t one of, if not the, most commercially successful musicians of our time. I could name any number of specific records broken or titles earned, but when you’ve gotten so many Guinness records broken that they can have their own top ten list, it seems sort of unnecessary. Despite this, it's pretty hard to find those who take her as seriously as say, your Beatles, Springsteens, or Sinatras. While they are certainly making different types of music, with the way music changes over time this isn’t really a fully acceptable explanation. Genre twists and turns with each passing year, but that doesn’t fully explain the way that so many critics, and run of the mill music listening adults seem to agree that Taylor Swift's music is just plain bad. 

    Swift released her self-titled debut album in 2006. It was a banjo and fiddle laden country record, with the majority of songs written exclusively by her, and six out of fourteen with a co-writer. She says that when she was first out looking for a contract with a record label as a pre-teen she was told “Well, the country-radio demographic is the thirty-five-year-old female housewife. Give us a song that relates to the thirty-five-year-old female, and we’ll talk.”

    I believe this is the crux of the reason Swift isn’t taken seriously as an artist. The taste of teen girls, whatever it happens to be in each decade, has consistently been an easy targets for verbal tomato throwing because of our societies unflinching belief that anything young girls likes is inherently dumb and worth making fun of. 

    This is to say that this dismissal of teenage girls' music taste isn’t new. One of the first large instances of this widespread trashing was Beatlemania and those reacting to it in the 1960s. Paul Johnson, of the New Statesman wrote in 1964 "Those who flock round the Beatles, who scream themselves into hysteria, whose vacant faces flicker over the TV screen, are the least fortunate of their generation, the dull, the idle, the failures". He continued, “the boys and girls who will be the real leaders and creators of society tomorrow – never go near a pop concert. They are, to put it simply, too busy. They are educating themselves. They are in the process of inheriting the culture which, despite Beatlism or any other mass-produced mental opiate, will continue to shape our civilisation.”

    Obviously, Johnson missed the mark with this assessment. The Beatles shaped the music and culture of the past 50 years like no one else before, and are one of only two artists to have five album spend at least six weeks at #1 on the Billboard 200 (with the other being none other than Taylor Swift). Johnson asks the audience of his article “The Menace of Beatlism” to pause before denouncing him as a “reactionary fuddy-duddy”, but 57 years later the vast majority of readers would do just that, likely laughing to ourselves with the hindsight Johnson didn’t have the pleasure of. 

    The Beatles have influenced countless other musicians since the 60s, and Swift, although not as far into her career, has already undeniably left her mark on the culture of our century. Gen Z stars like Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish have cited her music's influence on their own, and, love or hate them, many of us have had at least one of the 200 songs she’s released in the past 15 years stuck in our heads. I’m not the first to make the comparison between Swift and the Beatles. Given multiple records broken by only them and Swift, the comparisons sometimes make themselves. Taylor Swift, the Beatles, and Elvis Presley are the only three artists to ever spend a whole year at #1 on Billboard’s 200 chart, and each got it with a fan base of enthusiastic teen girls. Like it or not, the young girls of today are the tastemakers of tomorrow. Each generation hits an age where they like to look at the music of the present, scoff, and insist that music has been downhill ever since it moved on from their day. In 1999, the Guardian asked “Could this be the worst year in the history of pop music?”, but many now look back fondly and nostalgically at bands of the day. Everyone has the right to their own opinions, but one might stop and pause to ponder if those brushing Taylor Swift off as commercial auditory junk food in favor of the “real music” of yesteryear will end up looking like fuddy-duddies themselves down the line. 

Works Cited

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“Beatlemania: 'the Screamers' and Other Tales of Fandom.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 28 Sept. 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/sep/29/beatlemania-screamers-fandom-teenagers-hysteria.

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