1989: Not Taylor's Version

"1989" (2014), by Taylor Swift

It’s never just about the music. Good songs get into your bloodstream. Rhythms force your limbs to move. And the context matters.

Context is everything.

For context, this was my first encounter with Taylor Swift:

2014 was a dark year as riots and protests in Ferguson, Missouri, were on the news, and police across the country were offended by the suggestion that murdering people was not supposed to be part of the job. They claimed to feel like they were being unfairly attacked and lumped in with “a few bad apples.”

But for one officer, this bouncy cheerleader anthem, with its burping bass line and insouciant lyrics, perfectly captured the zeitgeist of that year. For the nation’s police, it has proven easy to “Shake It Off,” as they continue to claim larger budgets, maintain civil forfeiture laws, and more authority over the populace.

Seeing this guy, who obviously knows these words by heart, live his best life in front of the dash cam (with casual breaks for waving to passersby in a consciously masculine manner) went viral as a balm for people who felt unfairly called out by society at large. It let them move past the frightening specter of controversy and boil everything down to easily digestible team sports metaphors.

Their side is mean, and our side will just shake it off.

This specific context was probably not what Swift or her collaborators had in mind when they wrote this song, but sometimes this is the unintended consequence of putting art into our weird culture. At any rate, this was how Taylor Swift entered my consciousness.

My youngest had been given a copy of 1989 by a friend in middle school. Her portion of dark shit from 2014 included the bitter ending of several toxic friendships, and the CD was about to fall victim to the “purging of the things” that followed. I saw it in the trash can and rescued it because I can’t abide seeing music thrown away. And heck - I know that one song…

I am not the target audience for a Taylor Swift album, and I never formed a deep relationship with her music. On its own, I don’t have a lot to say about Swift’s 1989 album. I enjoyed listening to it. There are several songs where the melodies seem built on the bones of a nursery rhyme or a cheerleading routine, fleshed out with some solid country songwriting ideas and production that would be the envy of any number of pop bands who were active in 1989.

Compared to music I love deeply, the topics of the songs on 1989 can seem shallow to me or are overly concerned with appearances. That’s not an attack - it’s an observation that points to a difference between my generation and later generations that grew up in a fully online environment, forced to always present themselves to the world for judgment. For my generation, you put on your mask to go to school, but at home you could take it off and be yourself; for Taylor’s fans, you have to maintain that mask 24/7, and be prepared to defend yourself at all times.

Guys in my age cohort tend to consign anything not aimed at their demographic to the trash heap, especially if it can be written off as shallow…or overly concerned with appearances. I don’t ever want to commit the sin of dismissing art that doesn’t speak to me as much as it does to someone else. When someone calls art they don’t like trash - especially when it speaks to the romantic concerns of young people - I think of this scene from The Fisher King:

What stood out in my mind as I listened to 1989 were the moments on this album that reminded me of the music that was everywhere in the year of Taylor Swift’s birth. I have to wonder how moments were intended to make me think of music from that year. I’m certain there are things that I’m responding to that were not intended.

Intentional or not, this connection from one of the most popular artists on the planet in 2024 to the music of 35 years ago gave me an opening to fulfill part of the core mission of this newsletter.

One purpose for founding this newsletter is to find ways to draw both old Gen-X curmudgeons (like me) and the “kids” in more recent generations out of their musical enclaves and expose all of them to music they might have overlooked - whether new or old. We all need to be open to new ideas - whether those ideas are really new, or just new to us.

(This is also the mission of fellow Substacker, Gabbie, over at New Bands for Old Heads - check them out!)

Some of the fan devotion is driven by Taylor’s story - as a woman entrepreneur fighting against corporate greed and clawing back power over her art and her career. There are several stories like that about artists who released albums in 1989.

Some of the devotion is driven by songs that capture their fraught teenage feelings and give them a path out of the darkness. That has been a part of rock music since the rise of teenage culture and manifested in several ways when I was in high school.

Some of the references I make between Taylor’s songs and the albums of 1989 will seem obvious - some will be (I admit) a stretch. But once a month for the next year, I will devote one post to a different album (or set of related albums) from 1989 and tie it back to something from the album 1989.

The connections won’t always be obvious or direct - but the beauty of art is that we can reshape it around our hearts and make something new out of it.

If you don’t like that, shake it off, and come back in a couple of days for something else!