Shake it Off, Cruel Summer, All Too Well, both the original and the ten-minute version. The infamous Eras Tour. Her documentaries. Her relationships. Taylor Alison Swift won a singer-songwriter multi-grammy award at only 20 years old. Everyone knows Taylor Swift. Everyone loves Taylor Swift. Everyone is obsessed with Taylor Swift.
I hate Taylor Swift.
I might just be salty as a fellow American singer/songwriter, but here are two reasons why I don’t like Taylor Swift.
Taylor’s music is repetitive
As most of us know, Taylor Swift released her first album in 2006 at the age of 16: a country album. A respected album due to her age and the fact that it was the start of a legend, but I don’t see the hype. This is Texas. We have so much country music, and we always have. Her albums Taylor Swift, Folklore, and Fearless all sound the same to me, but people act like the country music she’s producing is life-changing, show-stopping, and something we’ve never heard before. Her songs Cruel Summer and Out of the Woods start similarly with repeated sound effects, the same BPM, and alike bass and drum patterns. Most of her music also follows the same topic: relationships, more specifically breakups. Most pop artists go to relationships, so it’s not just her, but I sense the same uninteresting wordplay, metaphors, and chord progressions.
Her song ideas also aren’t completely original; for example, www.tiktok.com states that ‘Karma’ and Halsey’s ‘I Am Not A Woman, I’m A God’ have similar beats and vocal rhythms. I think it’s also important to note that Halsey’s song was released in 2021, and Taylor’s song was released in 2022. Halsey’s song came first. It makes sense that the most popular artists are playing off of each other to gain popularity, but Taylor Swift doesn’t need any more than she has. Speaking of popularity…
She feels too popular
I literally looked up in the search engine, “Why do people not like Taylor Swift?” and nothing even popped up. (I guess this article will be the first to show up beneath that question)
Swift is so popular people base their entire personalities, opinions, and political beliefs around her, which depending on which way you swing, could be good or bad. For example, leading up to the election Taylor opened up about voting for Kamala Harris, the female runner for President this election: There was an immediate uproar of Reddit tags, TikTok posts, and angry FaceBook boomers after Taylor declared her side of the election, and no doubt she got plenty of money off of it. It feels like she talked about it more because it popped up on Austin’s local news station. I don’t think as a society we should allow people like Taylor Swift to get so big. She can smile and wave and make money off of it when people are struggling in low-income homes or even on the streets struggling to make a buck. If you’re going to be famous, at least make more of a difference in the world besides touring for a few years and licensing sticker books.
