We were enjoying our usual dignified breakfast of Fruity Pebbles and coffee this morning, perusing The New York Times arts section (because we miss the days when jazz was considered popular music) when our chewing slowed to an awkward standstill. It was a review of Taylor Swift's new album 1989 and something about it just felt wrong. Consider the offending passage:
"Modern pop stars—white pop stars, that is—mainly get there by emulating black music. Think of Miley Cyrus, Justin Timberlake, Justin Bieber. In the current ecosystem, Katy Perry is probably the pop star least reliant on hip-hop and R&B to make her sound, but her biggest recent hit featured the rapper Juicy J; she's not immune.
Ms. Swift, though, is having none of that; what she doesn't do on this album is as important as what she does. There is no production by Diplo or Mike Will Made-It here, no guest verse by Drake or Pitbull. Her idea of pop music harks back to a period—the mid-1980s—when pop was less overtly hybrid."
The crux of the matter, regardless of the writer's intentions, ends up being that Swift sets herself apart by not working "black" elements into her music. The '80s reference seems to suggest that this was the era when Anita Baker was R&B and Ray Parker Jr. was pop, and we music writers didn't have to scramble to come up with increasingly complex genre terms. Heck, if that made music better then the same argument could have been made that times were better when we just called them "race records," without worrying about the actual style of music held within.
The author of this piece is obviously not a racist but the attempts to differentiate Swift from the rest of the pop world were clumsy and unintentionally damaging, calling into question the rather American hybridization of music that has occured for generations now. Race wouldn't have even been an issue in this review if the writer hadn't felt so overwhelmingly compelled to refer to Cyrus, Timberlake and Bieber as "white pop stars," a decision just as irrelevant and provocative as calling Bad Brains "black punk icons."
Is Swift's new album whiter or does it feature less sampling than other popular music? David Byrne has made both very instrumental and very sample-heavy albums. Is Swift's album whiter or does it feature less guest verses? The Notorious B.I.G. has plenty of hits that swung both ways. Is Swift's new album whiter or does she write more of her own songs? Both Rihanna and Katy Perry have songwriters to thank. Any element of Swift's music that strikes listeners as "white" has an explanation outside of skin. Skin does not write songs nor does it play instruments.
We haven't heard 1989 as we don't have that sort of clout. We just thought it was worth pointing out that when critical vanguards such as The New York Times draws attention to race before talent before style, the rest of the world will follow in that train of thought.
And the world (and music) gets nowhere.
