What to do when your kid loves Taylor Swift? 😱

Listen along and keep your fucking mouth shut.

As I’ve mentioned previously, Taylor Swift gives me a serious case of the icks. Although she’s hardly the only contemporary pop superstar who strikes me as oddly dissociated when she speaks (I’ve also addressed Ariana Grande), there’s something particularly disturbing to me about Swift. My aversion, I should add, extends far beyond the realm of purely musical misgivings. Although her music certainly doesn’t help endear her to me, the skin-crawling sensation I get from her has almost nothing to do with aesthetics or taste.

When I see Swift onscreen, I get a strong sense not unlike what I felt the first time I watched footage of the Indian “spiritual leader” Osho. When I first set eyes on Osho (AKA Rajneesh), I was at a friend’s home with about half a dozen of us gathered in his living room. At one point, our friend Mary cheerfully suggested that we should watch an Osho clip she’d seen recently. She was enthusiastic about it — amused by Osho on an ironic level but also willing to entertain that there might be some wisdom and utility in his “teachings.”

This was years before the 2018 Netflix series Wild Wild Country, so I didn’t connect the guy onscreen with the Rancho Rajnessh controversy I’d only read about in passing in my teens. Nevertheless, my internal defenses sprung into place immediately once the room filled with Osho’s words, his visage enlarged to a grotesque degree just a few feet away. I felt like there was something snakelike emanating from my friend’s monitor and working its way into the room. (Not in a literal sense, but there was something about Osho’s bearing that felt invasive and slithery.) While everyone else laughed, I voiced my scorn.

“Ew, fuck this guy,” I said.

To which Mary responded: “Don’t you think it’s at least worth considering that he might have a point?”

“No,” I answered.

This, I thought to myself, is what separates me from people who end up getting swallowed up by cults. It’s not that I’m not susceptible to this kind of influence, but that I’m less inclined to let that kind of influence >in< because I have a built-in alarm system that reliably alerts me when I’m face-to-face with malevolence.

Admittedly, I also thought: Motherfuckers wouldn’t know how to trust their intuition if it knocked the wall down and barged into the room with all the subtlety of the Kool-Aid Man. This is WHY people end up psychically cannibalized by others. The entirety of Western culture has conditioned people to ignore their gut feelings. Tough shit — you ain’t gonna catch ME off guard!

Years later, I must concede that my friend Mary was right in one regard: Osho is pretty fuckin’ funny. I couldn’t help but crack up, for example, when I pressed play on a video posted on the Osho International YouTube page that starts with a title card that reads When Friedrich Nietzsche declared “God is dead,” FUCK became the most important word in the English language.

Suffice it to say that I can take Osho with a grain of salt these days. I’m even able to appreciate the kernels of wisdom in his talks, which walk the line between cult leader-esque know-it-all’ness and performance art. I still wouldn’t go near him with a 100-foot pole, and I wouldn’t entertain even the idea of deferring to him as some kind of guru. Psychologically speaking, I think people like him should be regarded as armed and dangerous. Which is to say that they must be approached with extreme caution, and that you’re better off not approaching them at all.

My feelings on Swift aren’t quite as extreme, but there’s just something that feels off to me about her. And when I watch, I can’t ignore the fact that my sensors are telling me that something’s wrong. It’s not like my instincts are screaming, but the message is unequivocal nonetheless: something’s amiss here, and it would be best to stay away.

On the one hand, I find her songs harmless enough — even catchy on a surface level. On the other hand, there’s an almost aggressively juvenile quality to both her lyrics and delivery. I find the discrepancy between her childlike earnestness and her image as a towering, larger-than-life sex symbol quite jarring in a way that I don’t think we should ignore. And her emotional range, if we can call it that, is almost grotesquely narrow. Her inability to look past her own feelings and anchor her lyrical perspective in anything outside her own concerns about how she’s received by the public all signal a person who’s frozen in her id, permanently flailing about in a state of infantile egocentrism.

By contrast, for instance, pop star Olivia Rodrigo is an actual teenager, and yet the awareness and verve she exudes in her music seem light years ahead of Swift’s chosen schtick of tripping over her own feet like a wounded, developmentally challenged puppy. Not to mention that Swift’s smiling, golly-gee presentation doesn’t align with the forcefulness I often detect rising from the back of her throat when she speaks, as if she’s holding back on some kind of explosive outburst that seems inches away from revealing itself but never breaks through.

If you hold Rodrigo and Swift side-by-side, in so many ways Rodrigo looks more, well, human. And I think it would be irresponsible not to ask ourselves: why is Swift’s brand of arrested adolescence being packaged and sold to us with such relentless insistence? I mean, you literally can’t go through a supermarket check-out aisle without Swift’s face beaming off every shelf.

I’ve seen people shrug-off the Swift phenomenon, as if she represents just the latest pop/youth-culture craze in a long lineage that includes the likes of Elvis, The Beatles, Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Lady Gaga. But I scoff at those arguments. They’re too overly rational. They ignore the pitch and charge with which people tend to respond to Swift. Much like with Donald Trump, it’s difficult to find anyone who responds to Swift with indifference. Ask anyone who’s even semi-conscious of pop culture about her and what you’ll likely get is either intense devotion or equally intense repudiation.

It’s been disquieting to watch as an entire fleet of music journalists — a substantial number of adult women, mind you — wax rhapsodic over Swift in breathless terms, making it their cause de guerre to hold the line in defense of what amounts to a regressed emotional state performed for all the world to see. Indeed, the intensity of the fervor for Swift is the only reason I care in the first place. If not for that, I’d scarcely have noticed Swift at all — that is, until my daughter, age 6, fell head over heels for Swift’s music.

In the last 24 hours alone, my daughter has listened to the same dozen-plus Taylor Swift songs in succession about 4 times through — and I’ve been in the room for most of it. Swift’s defenders might take delight in this turn of events. And I would agree that, in paper at least, it seems like a dose of karma for me to have to endure as my daughter immerses herself in the music of someone I have such strong distaste for. But here’s the thing: I’m loving it.

I in fact helped her go through and pick the songs she was interested in, and I made her playlists of those songs on both YouTube and Spotify in the order that she listened to them. I’ve watched — at her request — as she dances to these tunes. I’ve sat with her and her baby brother, all of us under the same blanket, as they watched the videos. To be honest, it was wonderful. It doesn’t change my opinion of the music, nor does it mitigate my concerns. But so what! There’s a time and place for those concerns, and it’s most definitely not when you see one or multiple kids digging on the music.

If I were to write a For Dummies guide on what to do when your kid starts listening to artists who make you blanche, it would consist of just one line: listen along, be a sport, and keep your fucking mouth shut. Oh, and also: revel in their enthusiasm, for goodness sake! For me, it’s been wonderful to put my earbuds in my daughter’s ears and watch as she gets so absorbed that she listens through a dozen songs in a single sitting. Or to hear her singing to herself in moments where the music isn’t playing — the same lines over and over, showing how much these songs have captured her heart.

Would I feel concerned if this lasted for, say, another year straight? Would there be something odd if she were only showing this kind of focus for Swift’s music and no one else’s? Of course. But we’re not at that point. And, even at 6, I’m more of the mind to give my kid the feeling that I trust her judgment. I mean, if I start getting it across that she has the capacity to navigate the muddy waters of artistic expression, my confidence in her will eventually blossom into actual good judgment.

It’s important to point out here that I was essentially given complete latitude to listen to whatever I wanted at the ripe old age of 12. I mean, my mom chimed-in with some mild opposition here and there, and I specifically remember one instance where she said “You’re still impressionable” — but I don’t think she truly believed that. I suspect she only said it because it was her parental responsibility to posture like she was acting as some kind of guardrail. But by the time she said it, that train had already left the station. And by my mid-teens, I was neck-deep in highly controversial albums like Reign in Blood and Straight Outta Compton.

The fact is, even at that age I had a pretty good head on my shoulders when it came to what I took-in. I may have listened to transgressive stuff, but I definitely had a sense of discretion, as well as a built-in instinct to reflect on what I was listening to. I can remember, for example, listening to Slayer’s “Angel of Death” for the first time — specifically the part where frontman Tom Araya rattles off a litany of the real-life atrocities committed at Auschwitz — and 1) asking myself am I okay with this??? while 2) still loving the shit out of the song. (I touched on Slayer’s use of Nazi iconography in this 2016 piece, and am addressing the subject at length in a Substack post currently in progress.)

Do I think it’s important to keep an eye out for how kids are internalizing the media they consume? Of course. Should we discuss subject matter with kids outright, though? Well… yes, but I feel like that’s a card we should be selective about playing. Much like being overly protective about physical safety can induce a sense of anxiety and dis-empowerment in kids, we’re fighting a losing battle if we try to parse every song lyric for them and place them on a microscope subject to our approval.

For now, Taylor Swift’s songs are more or less a perfect match for my kid’s 6-year-old concept of romance anyway — but that’s not the point. It’s inevitable that my kid is going to self-direct her way towards art that pushes boundaries. And, when the time comes, it’s not going to matter whether I feel she’s ready for it or not. In the meantime, I’d rather just support and encourage her journey through music. Which means I sit there with her and listen — happy to take part in her enjoyment, as well as grateful that she’s asking me to share the moment with her in the first place. (By my teens, I would sooner have absconded to a remote cave on Mars than listen to music within earshot of my parents.)

At the end of the day, my reservations about Taylor Swift don’t mean shit to the people who respond to her music. My qualms and criticisms simply have no place in their world. I would give anyone the same courtesy of being able to enjoy her songs in my presence without fouling it up for them. So in the case of my own child, this is about as much of a no-brainer as they come. And it’s fun, too.

Gotta run — it’s just about time to cue-up that playlist for the third time today.

<3 SRK