May 4, 2024
If I was my current age in 1964, as Beatlemania swept America, I would have absolutely hated the Fab Four. I would have been a 60-year-old jazz purist, dedicated to be-bop, hard-bop, and post-pop. I wouldn’t have had time for West Coast bop (sorry Brubeck), let alone mop top non-bop. I would have taken one look at the grinning lads from Liverpool, surrounded by millions of screaming girls, while they did their white people version of the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout,” and turned up my nose. “That’s pre-packaged bubblegum. I listen to serious music, like Miles and Trane,” I would have said.
Turns out those millions of teenage girls were right.
I’m not making that mistake 60 years later. I am fully in the grip of Swiftmania and I have my 9-year-old daughter to thank for it.
I’m deep in the bag for TS. The haters are the people who knee-jerk react to the trope that “Popular = Bad.” After all, the masses are asses, as L7 sang. Anything as massive as Taylor Swift must suck. That’s the same thing they said about the Beatles in 1964, who clogged up the pop charts with their “Yeah, yeah, yeahs!” But here’s the thing. You can dig L7 (and the Yeah! Yeah! Yeahs! and Miles and Coltrane) AND Taylor Swift. Tay is on my playlists next to punk bands like Destiny Bond and jazz freaks like Sun Ra. I’m not going to let your hipster elitism deny me the appreciation of this crazy trip, especially when it is being led by my Swiftie 4th grader.
Like a lot of people, I drug my heals on the Taylor Train. I prefer Tuareg music from Mali over the American Top 40. But her 2022 lofi dream pop album, Midnights, caught my attention. It took me to some unexpected places that I missed from my youth (like the sound of the wind down at 3 am). But it was when Cozy, my always enthusiastic about something daughter, switched her attention from the Animal Crossing video game to Taylor Swift that I bought my ticket onboard the Swift Express.
Cozy’s cohort followed mine in many ways. In third grade, it was all about the songs. “Cruel Summer,” always got a, “Turn it up, Dad” in the car. (For me it was “Burning Love,” by Elvis Presley.) Fourth grade is more about the artist. Cozy’s girl gang has lots of Taylor Talk before, during, and after school. (By the end of 4th grade, I’d seen most of Elvis’ 33 movies.) The Eras tour sweatshirts are like their team jerseys. Cozy makes song bracelets in hopes that one day she’ll be able to trade them at an actual concert. She’s made her bedroom into a shrine to Taylor with taped up magazine pictures and a rotating “Top 13” favorite song list. (13 is a magical number in Taylor-world.) At 13, my room was split between shrines to Kiss and the Beatles. She falls asleep each night to the TS CD’s I’ve loaded into her mother’s ancient iMac computer. And I assume all her friends live in a similar Taylor bubble.
Cozy’s fanaticism is infectious. She knows every Swift lyric, including to the “Anthology” version songs on Swift’s new album. She knows the outfits of the Eras tour including the “22 hat.” (I have no idea, but she tells me she’s going to show me a YouTube video that explains it.) When the new album, The Tortured Poets Department, dropped at 9 pm on April 18th, we sat together as it streamed into our lives. The next day we raced to the record store to pick up a vinyl copy and record a review for my YouTube channel. That night, her crew had a Swiftie listening party where all the girls dressed as a different era. Thanks to her mom’s make-up skills, Cozy nailed the Reputation look. I don’t know what would be the 1964 version of that, but I’d like to think 4th grade Randy (Ringo’s Version) would have most certainly been combing his hair forward.
It might be different if this was 1997 and I had a nine-year-old who was gaga over the Backstreet Boys. Taylor Swift is an insanely talented artist. Like Paul McCartney, she could sneeze and a brilliant song would come out. Like Bob Dylan, she can take the story of her life, slam words together, and create poetry that we will be analyzing for generations. If you don’t believe me, listen to Dylan’s 1975 track, “Tangled Up in Blue,” written after his separation from his wife Sara, and then the ten minute version of Swift’s “All Too Well,” written after her break up with Jake Gyllenhaal, and tell me they don’t fit together like two socks in a drawer. But because Swift is a young woman (and blonde and thin) her artistry is dismissed. There are plenty of music lovers who extol Joni Mitchell in 2024, who also derided her in 1970 for trying to “be Dylan.” I don’t know what will be seen as “classic” in 2074, but, if there is radio 50 years from now, “Cruel Summer” and the dozens of other Swift hits will be playing to welcoming ears of Gen Z elders and their mutant children.
The mission now is to get Cozy to a Taylor Swift concert. Taylor is playing at Wembley Stadium in London (where I saw Live Aid in 1985) on Cozy’s birthday on August 17th. The cheapest, behind the stage, tickets start at $1200. Tickets to see the Beatles in 1964 were five bucks. For the price of one Taylor Swift ticket I could have bought 240 Beatle tickets. (Yes, I did the math.) I’ve entered contests, bugged friends in London, and watched StubHub like a lunatic. I want Cozy to have this experience. She even described seeing Taylor in concert with her mom and dad as her “perfect day” in a recent family therapy session. When I was her age, my parents took me to see Elvis Presley and it turned me inside out. So, somehow, this will happen.
All this is just a truckload of fun. It’s as much about Cozy’s joy as it is about the wonderful music that Taylor Swift makes. Yes, some of those songs make me cry (“All You Had to Do Was Stay” was written about my own break up, I’m convinced). But I’ll remember (all too well) dancing in the kitchen with my kid to “Shake it Off” and re-discovering the way music can completely consume you. I have my Beatlemania thanks to Cozy. And I’m screaming my lungs out.
Watching the Wheels 