Taylor Swift studies takes a detour

An everlasting vision of the ever-changing view

Taylor Swift studies mostly exists so I can deal with my compulsive need to talk about Taylor Swift, whose work has assumed an outsized intellectual and emotional importance to me over the course of a very bad, very unstable, very boring year (and counting). But over the course of doing these newsletters, some side interests have emerged about stardom, art, and ambition.

There are lots of ways to pursue artistic ambition available to those who want to do so. For instance, you can do your own thing without caring much about the rest of it (i.e., loser theory). People who do this achieve whatever success they achieve within their own subcultures, where they have an audience literate enough in whatever they’re doing to appreciate them. Sometimes people doing their own small-scale thing blow up unexpectedly and go mainstream. But it’s not a goal. (They might also actively want not to blow up, for reasons of their own.) And people in this category can also be very successful and accessible—a band like Fountains of Wayne probably fits here—without ever getting huge.

But then, some people just want to get famous. They want to be a performer and a star, but they don’t have much personal creative ambition necessarily. They’re happy to hand those decisions over to other people. It’s probably worth noting here that putting your artistic ambitions into performance rather than creation is how “being a star” has worked for forever—it’s not a slam on an actress to say she doesn’t write her own roles or on an opera singer to say she doesn’t compose her own arias. You could say being a star is its own kind of skill.

Some people, however, really want both.¹ They don’t just want to write good songs—they want to write charting hits. But they also, crucially, want to write good songs. Getting famous without that artistic satisfaction would be as worthless to them as the converse. This is obviously the hardest ambition to carry because while writing a good song is within your control, writing a hit is not. These are your Taylor Swifts.

But she has a lot of forerunners in that category, including somebody she has consciously imitated—Carole King.² So let’s take a detour.³

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Carole King wrote songs for what was, essentially, a song factory. We call it the “Brill Building” now, because that was the name of one of the buildings people were writing songs in. She wrote them mostly with her husband at the time, Gerry Goffin—he did the lyrics, she did the music. She was a trained musician, he was not, which seems to have been both a strength in their partnership and a source of tension.

A potted history of the Brill Building era of music goes something like this:⁴

1900–55: The age of the “Great American Songbook.” Cole Porter and George Gershwin reign supreme. America is a country for adults who sip little martinis.

1955–56: Teenagers are discovered. Their spending power is incredible. Adults found dead in a ditch.

1956–64: Golden age of “Brill Building” music. Shoobeedoobeedoo. Da doo ron ron. Phil Spector does his “wall of sound” thing, I guess. He is ruining lives at this point but hasn’t actually killed anybody… yet.

1965: The Beatles arrive. Teens want bands that write their own songs now. The old order is overthrown. Gerry Goffin splits from Carole King but his new girlfriend only plays Bob Dylan records.⁵

Now, is this accurate, exactly? No. (For one thing, there’s a lot more overlap here than this kind of timeline allows for, which is why the dates above are all somewhat wrong.) For me, as a person with a shaky grasp on music genre at the best of times, it’s funny to read about the intensely felt rivalries among people who are now poured indiscriminately into the category oldies. One of the things I did not much care for about some of the books I read for this is that they try so hard to recapture what it must have been like to live amidst these musical shifts that it ends up just sounding absurd, as if the first time “Lollipop” played on the radio everybody over the age of thirty was crawling around on the floor, blood pouring out of their ears. But then—here’s the thing—“Lollipop” is a very stupid song. So, who knows.

Still, the idea of somebody who listens avidly to Frank Sinatra but turns up a nose at listening to “Be My Baby” is hard to imagine. Now, the audience for both of those things is more or less the same person (who is also, let’s be clear, me).⁶

In retrospect (and this point is also made in some of the books I read), the Brill Building writers were still writing with one foot in the songbook tradition—they wanted to produce standards, not songs that were only for singular artists. (And they did, at least some of the time.) But they couldn’t write Cole Porter songs, or George Gershwin Songs, or Irving Berlin songs, because they were writing for teenagers, not adults—and those songs are truly adult in their sensibilities.⁷ Cole Porter would never have produced something as completely simple as “Leader of the Pack.”⁸

Carole King, however, was in an interesting position when the switch from short-lived acts that served to be the “face” of a song to more “authentic,” artist-driven music happened. Because she was both, after all—she’d written all those songs and she was a trained musician. The things that might have been demerits back in the fifties and sixties—the way she’s always a little unkempt and frizzy, and so on—those were assets when it came to authenticity.

So she went back and recorded her old songs herself (well, some of them) and released them in 1971 on the album Tapestry, which went on to become one of the biggest albums of all time.⁹

I actually think the little Apple Music blurb for her music is a pretty good example of the image she’s now achieved, so I will quote it:

Even when she’s putting words (and melodies) in other people’s mouths, Carole King excels at making music out of the excruciating, exhilarating moments that resonate in your heart and gut. Whether framed as big-budget piano pop, cozy strummed folk, or bruised girl-group singalongs, her songs are intimate soundtracks for the movie that is your life.

In short, King managed to be a big guy and a little guy at the same time: the architect of big hit songs, but also just a woman pouring her heart out at the piano. She’d thrived under the Brill Building order but she could also feel like a piece of the machine that broke free and stood up for herself. She was the magician stepping out from behind the curtain, except that unlike the Wizard of Oz, she was the real thing.

Taylor, of course, can never pull this balance off, because she never was behind the curtain. She’s a star who has always wanted to be a star. She’s the face of her own success. But what allies King with Taylor isn’t just that they’re both songwriters writing “intimate soundtracks” (though they are) but a flexibility that lets them make the jump between shifts in the musical landscape. King could sell the same songs twice because she understood the change that had to happen for those songs to work their charm for a new audience. (It also helped that her songs were not stupid.)

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It would be a big mistake to romanticize the era of the “Brill Building,” the same way it would be a big mistake to romanticize the old Hollywood studio system.¹⁰ It was extremely exploitative, particularly for the “stars” themselves, who would often sign contracts that meant they only received peanuts for their big hits, and whose stardom often lasted only a hit or two in any case. (Ken Emerson notes in Always Magic in the Air that the Dixie Cups claim to have received less than $500 total for “Chapel of Love.”)

Much like old Hollywood, which produced many deeply stupid movies and was willing to mow down anybody it had to to do it, this era of music cheerfully ruined lives in the name of countless inanities. The woman who co-wrote “Lollipop” penned a very embittered memoir titled I Was The First Woman Phil Spector Killed!, which I am currently reading. (Look for it in the capsule reviews, probably.)

Nonetheless, people do romanticize it. In the episode of This Is Pop about the Brill Building, one of the former writers mentions studying the top ten hits of the time to reverse engineer a hit for himself. A contemporary artist interviewed later in the episodes indignantly insists that what that guy was doing was totally different from somebody who deliberately mimicks top ten hits today. But it wasn’t. The Brill Building was not some utopian haven for art. If it wouldn’t be true to say that the good stuff it produced it produced by accident, it would be even less true to pretend that its success in churning out hits was a kind of byproduct of some purer ambition.¹¹

However, I think that’s what’s interesting here for me, and maybe what’s interesting to me about any great pop art in general: how art gets produced under these circumstances. In many ways, writing hits is an austere and punishing practice. In her blog post about working with Taylor on “Clean,” Imogen Heap remembers trying out a weird chord progression only for Taylor to firmly redirect her:

We still needed a middle section. I fancied really stripping it down, quite moody. So we tried a few things out. One of which had me going over to the keyboard to suggest a slightly ‘odd’ chord progression as I do like a bit of that on my own records. I played it to Taylor and she quite clearly said “I think we’re going to lose them at this point” and I said... ‘wow... that I [sic] why you sell millions of records and I don’t!’ She is Taylor Swift and she knows best, so we stuck to the chords, I created a bit of tension in the music instead and then we could woosh into the final chorus from there.

You don’t get to goof around. You don’t get to indulge yourself. If you write a song and people don’t like it, you failed. If I write something and people don’t read it, well, that’s just another day here at BDM Industries. (I’m not talking about you, obviously. You’re reading this.) But if Stephen King writes a book and people don’t read it, that’s failure. If Stephen Spielberg makes a movie and nobody watches it, that’s failure.

Nevertheless, you wouldn’t say that these guys are not artists—or that they’re not experimenting, innovating, or trying new things. (Or maybe you would, I don’t know you.) They’re just doing it within particular restraints.

Similarly, Taylor made the hard pop turn she made with 1989 (supposedly) because Red didn’t win Album of the Year at the Grammys.¹² (She had already wanted to move in that direction, is my impression, given the pop tracks on Red, but 1989 really did represent a solid break.) You can hate 1989 (I do) but still understand the logic there: Red Taylor got as big as she was going to get. But Taylor-the-person Taylor wanted to get bigger and knew she could. So, much like the Brill Building guy in the past, she figured out what she had to do.¹³

Of course when I’m thinking about all this stuff involving popularity and ambition and art in music, I’m also thinking about books and even to some degree about myself. But there are a few reasons why music is a more interesting way to think about all of this than books, at least to me. One is that there is no real book equivalent to something like the Billboard Hot 100. The closest thing is the New York Times Bestseller list… but for various reasons, I do not think they are really comparable.

Second, music moves faster and is much more immediately responsive to popular taste than books are these days. (The same goes for movies and TV, which will are responding to trends that are years old by the time they actually come out.) An album might take a lot of time to write and perfect, but an individual song does not.

Third, popular music is in a very weird place now that makes it analogous to books. People prefer to listen to older music; it’s just not clear what’s popular anymore or how to move your product. But since it’s much more in flux and more flexible, you can see how different people are trying to deal with it. In some ways it seems like it’s almost regressing back to the Brill Building world where songwriters and producers are the real powerhouses, and stars are mostly ephemeral. But not quite.

Finally—and this is admittedly sort of an idiosyncratic reason—the music industry is incredibly, cartoonishly evil. So you have music, which I think is indisputably the art form that matters the most to most people in their day to day lives, and then you have the people who bring you that music, who are basically Satan. Book publishing isn’t really evil, at least as far as I know. It’s just cynical. So the question of how you produce good work in the midst of this machine gets a bit more dramatic, I think.

Anyway, while I’m not sure what the next installment of TSS will be (or when it will be), I’m pretty sure this isn’t the last time we’ll be talking about Carole King. We’ll see…

1. Dividing people into these categories isn’t meant to imply that what they get out of their careers is a matter purely of choice. You might want a more private career and end up with a public one, or you might want to write smashes but only write niche successes, or you might have no talent and no charisma despite a desperate wish to be A Star. As Philip Larkin says:

Life is an immobile, locked,
Three-handed struggle between
Your wants, the world’s for you, and (worse)
The unbeatable slow machine
That brings what you’ll get.

That said I do assume that the vast, vast majority of people who make it really big had making it really big a primary goal. Maybe one or two people every decade genuinely blow up by accident. I’m just making that number up but it feels emotionally true.

2. I don’t think this counts as a conscious imitation, because what I’m about to point out is something a lot of artists do, but it is kind of funny to me. Here’s “I Feel the Earth Move”:

You notice that little ah-ha-ha in there around 1:50…? Well:

3. Necessary disclaimer here, maybe:

I’m not doing a poptimism thing. You could characterize all of Taylor Swift studies as such I guess, insofar as it’s talking about popular stuff, but I’ve never been trying here to argue here for “more respect” or “Taylor Swift is actually better than [insert more obscure and experimental singer songwriter here]” or whatever. That’s frankly not very interesting to me.

Part of why the occasional spat between Martin Scorsese and the makers of superhero movies is always sort of interesting is because Scorsese himself is a pop guy. He is not some kind of highbrow experimental art movie maker and he never has been. The fight there is about pop art—what makes it good, what makes it bad, what makes it significant. It ends up getting cast in highbrow vs pop terms because we live in stupid times. But it is ultimately pop on pop violence.

Taylor Swift studies, similarly, is absolutely an examination of pop artists, with pop here meaning popular, not the genre known as “pop.” But if you think there’s going to be an eventual installment about how Taylor is soooo much smarter than Joanna Newsom or something, well… there will not be, sorry. There is no point in comparing them because they are after different things.

4. I’m mostly drawing off of two books in this newsletter: Ken Emerson’s Always Magic in the Air and Sheila Weller’s Girls Like Us, plus the Brill Building episode of the documentary series This Is Pop. Full disclosure, I did not like either of the books (and in fact am currently stalled out in the middle of Girls Like Us), and the episode of This Is Pop also annoyed me. That said, they have a lot of interesting quotes in them.

5. From Ken Emerson’s Always Magic in the Air:

“Now I’m basically retired,” Goffin said, noting that “after I split from Carole, most of the women I lived with didn’t care for any of my music, and they always brought home the next Dylan album. . . . I’ve given up trying to be a great lyricist. I’m just trying to be an adequate one.”

6. Actually I don’t care for Sinatra.

7. It’s probably not an accident that as the songs get simpler production starts to get more complicated. Would there be a point in “wall of sound”-ing “You’re The Top,” or whatever? I’m sure these things got their complicated productions later on, but….

8. It’s not a totally useful comparison but you can put the only Porter song I can think of that involves a story about somebody actually dying—“Miss Otis Regrets”—against “Leader of the Pack.” (“Miss Otis Regrets” is probably the only Cole Porter song I actually just dislike, but anyway.) With its constant repetition of “Miss Otis regrets she's unable to lunch today,” it’s arch and satirical, not gutted and heartbroken.

9. There’s a very obvious Taylor parallel here, of course, with the re-recordings. It doesn’t really work in terms of the concrete details of what’s happening but it sort of works emotionally. Right now, however, she’s just playing this as the last song before the Eras concert kicks off:

Not a Carole King song, ofc.

10. I did just read Jeanine Basinger’s The Star Machine and there are, naturally, some interesting Taylor comparisons—notably, Loretta Young, whose (derogatory) nickname was the “steel butterfly.” This paragraph in particular struck me as Tayloresque, especially that last line:

She had become a top-drawer movie star, appearing in top-drawer films. She had the money, the fan mag adulation, the fame, and the respect, and she had done it without most of the star machine manipulations, slipping past the one-two-three-kick plan for manufacturing people like her. Almost any actress in Hollywood would have settled for Young’s career; it was what most of them dreamed of achieving. But Young was restless, dissatisfied—not with stardom itself, which had always been a motivating goal for her, but with her form of it. She knew what it was she wanted from her stardom: She wanted more than the others had; she wanted control. She didn’t want to walk away, like a Deanna Durbin, or get away from the crowds, like a Garbo, or just choose her own roles, like a Davis. She wanted to make all the decisions herself. Like her mother, Loretta Young was a smart businesswoman. The system told her she was a product, so she figured that if her business was herself, she wanted to be the CEO.

11. From Always Magic in the Air again—this is about an attempt to play with Elvis’s image that was firmly rejected by his management. I think it’s a good companion to that quote about Loretta Young above:

[Jerry] Leiber and [Mike] Stoller’s relationship with Presley was also short-lived, largely because Elvis’s manager, “Colonel” Tom Parker, and the Aberbachs would not countenance anyone getting close to the King and unsettling the goose that was laying one golden egg after another. Leiber had the temerity to suggest that Budd Schulberg might be enticed to script and Elia Kazan to direct a film of Nelson Algren’s A Walk on the Wild Side starring Presley as the novel’s antihero in “hide-tight jeans”.… The Aberbachs were unimpressed that a reunion of Schulberg and Kazan might do for Presley what On the Waterfront had done for Marlon Brando. Since Presley was already a star, what need was there to make him one? According to Leiber, Jean Aberbach threatened, “If you ever try to interfere with the business or artistic workings of the process known as Elvis Presley . . . you will never work with us again.”

Leiber and Stoller are the writers behind “Hound Dog,” by the way. You know… this song:

12. This is received wisdom and I do believe it but I couldn’t track down a clear source for it. I will update with one if I find it.

13. And sometimes Taylor takes the pulse of the culture wrong, of course—I think Lover, especially its singles, represents her really misreading the room. “ME!” should be “Shake It Off” 2.0—but it’s not. Why it’s not is honestly a mystery to me because if I don’t care for 1989, I have a Count of Monte Cristo–sized grude against “Shake It Off.” I honestly like “ME!” much more. But there you go.