Taylor Swift & Lily Allen (Supplemental Post #6)

I have always had (and I think I will always have) mixed feelings about Taylor Swift.  My relationship to her as a spectator follows a cyclical pattern of two interchangeable steps:

1. Being a fan.
2. Remembering why I'm not a fan.

Taylor Swift writes great music and she's very talented.  I actually own a lot of her songs and enjoy them often.  But it's her persona aside from her music that can at times leave a bad taste in my mouth. By this, I mean that she seems to make business decisions that often anger me. I hit my breaking point when she took her music off Spotify and wrote a whole article about how the application is stealing from artists.  I personally love Spotify, and think it's great because you're not actually downloading music, but streaming it online.  In my eyes, and this was probably not Ms. Swift's intention, the decision made her look greedy.  Furthermore, in a matter of weeks news broke out that she had trademarked phrases like "party like it's 1989."  I'm pretty sure Prince coined that one with "party like it's 1999."  Her business decisions can get on my nerves, but I do enjoy her music.

Concurrently, I am rediscovering my love for Lily Allen music.  I think she's extremely smart and many of her songs are extremely satirical.  I'm particularly liking her track "URL Badman" from her latest album, Sheezus.  In the song, she sings from the perspective of an internet "troll" who tears into female artists on his blog.  She points out the ruthlessness of online bloggers, singing "I don't like you/ I think you're worthless/ I wrote a long piece about it up on my Wordpress."  I think she makes a great point of how the Internet can be a pretty brutal place, and not just for celebrities.  It's fine to have your own opinions, but people can often take it too far and make nasty comments that they'd never say in the light of day.  I also particularly like her song "Hard Out Here," in which she points out the double-standard for women in the music industry and the objectification they face on a daily basis.  She sings, "You should probably lose some weight, 'cos we can't see your bones/ You should probably fix your face or you'll end up on your own/ Don't you want to have somebody who objectifies you?"  The music video is particularly poignant since it shows Allen dancing with half-naked women while an older studio executive instructs her on how she should dance more provocatively.  I think the video tackles a lot of issues female artists face today, especially in music videos which have the "male gaze" at their core.