Music: Pop: Taylor Swift — What kind of pop star will I be?

How long can she stay an ingénue? Ms Swift doesn't seem to be very swift, but she's got her niches and she is what she is and also she is what she isn't.  Musikos, refWrite Backpage music newspotter, analyst, and columnist.


New York Times (Oct24,2k12)

No More Kid Stuff for Taylor Swift

Ethan Miller/Getty Images; Christopher Polk/Getty Images, for Clear Channel

Taylor Swift in 2007, left, and last month, right.

By JON CARAMANICA

Published: October 24, 2012

AWE and amazement have been Taylor Swift’s grammar for years now. Whether singing about love or heartbreak — there has been no third subject — Ms. Swift has excelled at capturing the fresh sting, as if arriving at a feeling for the first time.

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Brian Doben

Taylor Swift has always been a pop star in a country context more than a country star.

But Ms. Swift is 22 now, and certainly she has seen some things. For most of “Red,” her fourth album, that’s not necessarily clear. Her growth is largely musical, not experiential.

There is a moment, though, on “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” — the album’s lead single and, as it happens, her first No. 1 pop hit — where the cracks begin to show. At the bridge the song gives way to a conversation between Ms. Swift and friends in which she’s recalling how she shut down a persistent ex who wouldn’t stop calling.

“This is exhausting,” she tells him, emphasizing the middle syllable of the last word, like a car that’s just run out of gas. There is something different in Ms. Swift’s voice here: it’s serious and deep, and also shrewd. She has been through this before. She sounds like an adult.

It’s about time. Ms. Swift, now six years removed from her debut single, has become one of the most important pop artists of the last decade. But her evolution has been purposefully slow, making sure not to leave behind any of the young women who hold her up as a paragon of beauty, talent and civility. That she did this as a country singer was both savvy — the genre demands morals in a way pop doesn’t — and also, ultimately, limiting.

It was never a question of whether Ms. Swift would become a pure pop star; the only question was what sort. She’s without precedent: not as a country star looking for something bigger, but as a pop singer trying hard to maintain an air of innocence. Any young woman who’s tried to own similar space has done it by making choices — of subject matter, of outfits, of public melodrama — that Ms. Swift has gone out of her way to avoid. (You could make a case that Adele has skipped these steps too, but her music was never young and therefore never had to find a way to grow up.)

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