![]() Plato said that music was dangerous to society because it bypasses the intellect and speaks directly to the heart. Anybody who can pull that off is, forgive me, rock-and-roll to the core. ![]() Say what you want about Taylor Swift, but she’s doing this very thing for millions of people every single day. I listen to music because I long for that magical combination of the true, the good, and the beautiful that unlocks the soul’s capacity for the divine. When I listen to music, I’m longing for somebody to say something true, something honest and insightful, and to do so with the beauty of music that drills its way through my protective armor and lodges itself in my soul. But I have come to fully embrace Mark Fisher’s assertion that rock-and-roll is all but dead, colonized by late-stage capitalism and robbed of its Promethean core. Rock music was born to say the quiet part out loud and to be a pain in the establishment’s ass. My favorite thing about rock-and-roll has always been its prophetic damn-the-man power-to-the-people center. But I have had some experiences with her music this year that have me taking a second look. ![]() I know the cynical rock-and-roll script to dismiss Taylor Swift’s legitimacy as an artist: it’s just brilliant marketing, she has the best songwriters money can buy, I like her music but her fans, and so on. So I’ve been listening to her music, and talking with her fans, I even watched the live show movie while reading along with the lyrics. Good songwriting has always been irresistible to me. I made my living this way for the better part of a decade (cue Satellite Soul on Spotify), and although these days my writing is more prose I still love writing music. Also, I’m a songwriter by trade and passion. Plus my wife has been steadily feeding me Taylor Swift song backstories for years. It was actually her 2 sold-out shows at Arrowhead that grabbed my full attention earlier this year. But, I live in Kansas City, and am a huge Chiefs fan, so the Kelce romance has been a big part of the cultural discourse in my city. I was dismissive of the TS phenomenon for a long time.
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