Taylor Swift's 1989 - Why I'm A Fangirl
Guilty Pleasure? Embarrassed??? Hardly.
As much as I love music, and devoted a significant amount of my life to it, I can still be pretty closed minded. I like what I like and over the last few years I’ve lived deeply in that bubble. Why listen to the radio when I’ve got 20k+ songs in iTunes? I also no longer care about being cool—I’m over having to be the first to hear a new rock band or searching for the meaning of life within lyrics. I think there’s two reasons for this:
One, I’m getting older. Not all music, or even the music I used to like, resonates with me like it used to. There’s nostalgia attached, but I certainly can’t get excited about the new pop punk band singing about getting kicked out of high school—nor should I. I never thought I’d see the day when I didn’t have much of an interest in Warped Tour or picking up an issue of AP—but those days are over, and I’m okay with that.
Secondly, my time at Sony forced me to listen to a lot of music I’d otherwise have no interest in. Leaving that world was like a spiritual backlash to anything Top 40—I could refocus on the music that moved me, rather than it’s commercial viability. New music doesn’t mean good music, and now being a private citizen, I only have to worry about good music.
With that said, Taylor Swift’s 1989 is good music.
I was getting out of the music industry as Swift was skyrocketing. At that point she was considered a country artist with crossover appeal and I was a rock and pop specialist—I had no reason to listen to her and didn’t because I loath country. When I left the industry, she became my “now that I quit the hamburger stand, I never want to eat another hamburger again” artist. I always respected her from afar because she wrote her own music and seemed to have a grasp on her career, but I also wanted to vomit at the thought of teen-girl-country-pop. Each one of those words compounding my gag reflex.

