argumate:

I mean it’s a little foolish to knock Taylor Swift for basing her brand on authentic teenage experiences that she never actually had for the same reason that it’s naive to point out that William Shakespeare wasn’t an Italian teenager willing to die for love; the art is separate from the artist, and the better the artist the less likely they actually have any personal experience in what they’re arting.

that’s really rammed home watching this Dylan documentary where you have a pack of folk musicians, ie. hippies from New York and California, touring small town America and hosting a festival of Authentic Folk Americana for the rubes.

they describe Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, who looks like a cowboy left out to dry in the desert for forty years, as the son of a Jewish dentist from Brooklyn, which he was (apparently he ran away to a rodeo as a teenager and saw his first singing cowboy and knew how he was going to spend his life) but the song writer and story teller and spinner of yarns is not the person who does things, they’re the person who acts out the doing! it’s an entirely separate role!

Taylor Swift is 29 now and in 2010 she had a song called Innocent about comforting from experience a specifically 32-year-old after having gone too deep into being a party girl and wanting to feel fresh and worthy again

Which was obviously not an experience she had, but it was something she noticed in the “red” culture country music serves. I see men out of that culture grousing about it, and about the pastors urging them to “man up” and accept these Nth-hand goods to love and to cherish as their household angels

And so she wrote that up, and honestly it’s more evocative and insightful than it has any right being, I really do think she’s an excellent lyricist with an eagle eye for cultural nuance