Taylor Swift & Neil Young vs. Karl Marx
I wrote this blog post on a whim in December 2022. Some people hated it, which I thought was funny, so I might as well republish it here.
Last week [December 2022], I polled a few readers on their preferred topic for the next blog post, and from the admittedly arbitrary set of choices, “Taylor Swift apologia” held a decisive 41% lead over the distant second, “Neil Young’s best albums.” In the future, I will consider ranked-choice voting. Fortunately, these topics are both salient in current day for roughly the same reason — they are positive examples of artists asserting personal autonomy over their productive assets in generally beneficial ways. Of course there are other artists who don’t even bother showing a trace of altruistic motive, and that is ultimately (or ought to be, I think) the artist’s own prerogative. Nevertheless, their intellectual property disputes elucidate the ability of an artist to connect with fans and exchange shared experiences which will always transcend a commercial entity’s legal claims on material artifacts.
At the end of the day, a musician who produces directly for her fans will owe her usurers nothing. Naturally, that is far easier said than done.
In the end of the 2004 biopic Ray, Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles coyly asks Atlantic Records executives, “since I’m producing my own records, I was wondering if I could own my masters, too?” Sadly, in a pattern not uncommon for child actors and singers, Taylor Swift was never offered this opportunity when she signed her first major record contract at age 15 in 2005 — the year Foxx won an Oscar for his energetic portrayal of the young Ray.
To make a long and vexing story all too short, after the contract expired and Swift moved to a new label, the label that owned her old masters was acquired by a venture capital firm for $300 million in 2018. The firm is owned by a former manager and frequent business partner for a now-famous Holocaust denier named Kanye West, both of whom, by most accounts, bullied Swift mercilessly. Even the most successful pop star in the world was unable to claim the rights to the original copies of her recordings. Fans were shocked and outraged. How could such blatantly unjust exploitation still be legal?
Under the US Copyright Act of 1976, Congress did include “termination rights” attempting to set a roughly 35-year limit after which an artist has 5 years to vest their right to acquire ownership. In practice, legal scholar Meredith Rose explains, it’s exceedingly difficult for the original artist to re-vest their rights because they must give Notice of their intent to terminate at least two years before doing so, in addition to the 5-year window for vesting. It’s rare, but it does happen — for example, the lead singer of Village People won back his rights to songs such as “YMCA” after a lengthy suit in 2012.
Anyway, I think there’s no denying that Swift’s answer to this whole thing, re-recording several of the albums released under her old contract as “Taylor’s Version” albums, is pretty cool. We can also hope this legal atrocity that exploits and abuses young artists comes to an end and makes Taylor’s Versions a quirk of history, one of those times when human ingenuity and sheer gumption loudly defied unjust legal regimes. Some also advocate for reforming termination rights to help artists avoid Taylor Swift’s ordeal in the future.
It’s certainly not something a critical scholar like Walter Benjamin would have predicted when he presaged the death of traditional “aura” and the triumph of a public, politically charged consumption of The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. When the medium of art is reproduced in factories rather than crafted by elite craftsmen, Benjamin reasoned, its cheap abundance and distribution would activate the political consciousness of the masses toward “progressive” causes rather than “reactionary” ones. Film in particular was supposed to bring about “the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage.” I think by now it’s fair to say his prediction may have missed the mark.
For starters, I doubt you’d have an easy time convincing a diehard Swiftie that the creative labor or that Swift fandom has a discrete “exhibition value” vs. “cult value.” Having lost the legal battle over the ownership of original recordings, Swift reasserted control over what her fans truly value: Taylor Swift being Taylor Swift. As much as critics can deride the same-ness of the music, nobody else can really do exactly that, but she can do it as many times as she wants, undermining scarcity-value by making new copies of it. Far from being reactionary, her fans can now relate to her as a merchant-worker reclaiming the title to the product of her labor from mendacious financiers. While Big Machine Records (an apt name in this context) may own the exclusive legal right to copy specific recordings made for a set of albums, these assets have since lost the aura of authenticity which once guaranteed substantial cashflows.
Rather than thinking in terms of abstract value, the ledger-minded might think of Swift’s masters as a financial asset like a stock or a bond, with vulture capitalist owners ruthlessly exploiting their legal claims on future transactions with this specific set of recordings. I would even venture to suggest that owning masters can be crudely seen as a form of securitization, a way for media companies to diversify the risk of producing new art while leveraging against future content rights as collateral.
Metaphors don’t have to be perfectly accurate but you get the idea: investors take a bigger cut of future assets to hedge against the long tail of unprofitable art. The trick is that the artist ends up with a growing share of the upside taken away from them while still being saddled with all the downside risk. Fans are right to be outraged when an artist’s creativity is turned into a liability.
I think it’s unambiguously good for someone this effective at fighting back and exposing these systems of exploitation and abuse to have potentially billions of fans around the globe. Now potentially billions of people will see that, in fact, it is possible to claim your share of the upside. It should make us optimistic that world leaders like the President of Chile are avowed Swifties. If this is the new normal, we should celebrate it and encourage it.
I have so far resisted the inevitability of commenting on the music itself, which I think is, well, just fine, perhaps not worth a concert ticket but also miles ahead of other Top 40 pop hits in terms of emotional range. Put simply, a lot of pop music is pretty dumb and saccharine by design, but Swifties never fail to remind us that she has higher standards. The fear we Swift-skeptics often have as consumers of mass media is something like, “if my feelings are so basic and relatable that billions of people can understand them through these songs, am I really all that unique?” Swifties, to their credit, seem to not care or consider this any cause for concern — being human just is what it is.
I don’t think it’s like, reactionary or any silly Adorno paranoia like that. Of course, Swift’s persona is clearly an introspective soul who dwells in torrid passions, forlorn memories, and painful ambiguities. And yes, in our best moments, we’d like to think we all are, too. I also think this is generally true of Neil Young, whose music I enjoy much more, but more on that later. In preparation for this article, I listened to “All Too Well,” the sprawling 10-minute re-recording of a 5-minute hit from 2012/2021’s Red. It was fine. I endured it with no problems.
10-minute songs are a good benchmark for judging pop/rock artists who use verse-chorus-bridge structures because a lot of songs get boring if they’re longer than the usual 45rpm single maximum of 4–5 minutes, so it takes genuine skill to sustain an interesting song for twice as long. It’s got some big crescendos and dramatic stadium-rock piano punctuated by some genuinely interesting dueling violin solos… and actually that’s about all I noticed.
If we take pop music on its own terms — which, if you listen to a lot of different kinds of music, is often a good exercise in humility — we can say it’s a job well done. It’s not any more boring of a song at the 9-minute mark than on the first verse. Practically speaking, if I had young children, I’d probably be happier if they bounced around to these songs rather than the latest Disney soundtrack, but the parents I know have varying opinions on this.
Contra Adorno, I don’t think people are going to lose their ability to think critically if they enjoy simple pleasures or relate to one another through basic emotions, not least of all since popular entertainers are still often visibly active both within and as political institutions themselves. While I don’t find her songs’ stories especially compelling or relatable, it seems reasonable to suppose if billions of people do, that is probably overall a good thing for the arc of human history. It seems a more bearish view would have to take far too pessimistic a view of popular culture and human nature than the evidence warrants nowadays. Among other theories that would hold Swifties in contempt, postwar Frankfurt school Marxist critiques of popular culture may have to concede that some doomsday prophecies were ill-conceived. For instance:
For the Marxist, then, isolation seems inevitable. If you play popular music, you’re a part of the commodity which is isolating people and chaining their spirits to the capitalist machine. If you play unpopular music, you begin to hate your fellow human beings because they won’t pay you to play what they don’t want to hear. In every case, a man is isolated and can have no effect on society.
— William Poulos. “Adorno and Jazz”
Well all those people, they think they got it made
But I wouldn't buy, sell, borrow or trade
anything I have
to be like one of them.
I'd rather start all over again.
- Neil Young, "Motion Pictures" (1974)
Now, a quick word about Neil Young. While he is perhaps more recently known for removing his music from Spotify after the company refused to stop streaming pseudoscientific vaccine denial by Joe Rogan, the kooky Canadian folk-rocker has really always been a bit of a stubborn iconoclast worth celebrating.
This meme by @inzane_johnny roughly sums up an uncannily Swift-like situation in his career:
Neil Young had a similar but totally different problem in the 1980s. After switching to Geffen Records, he tried out some more experimental sounds, but the label demanded that he stick to being a rock and roll star. In 1983, Geffen sued Neil Young for making “uncharacteristic” albums. It turns out, while the record contract served as a sort of amortized claim on future creativity, the bondholder also wanted to claim that they were owed some reasonable expectation of commercially viable creative products.
In other words, if Neil Young doesn’t produce the expected Neil Young hits, why should we pay him to be Neil Young? Young’s years-long response was to keep making more weird music and insisting — correctly — that he had every right to do so. The contract was not a bond but an open-ended gamble that Young’s creativity would produce another chart-topping hit; he was not contractually obligated to reduce their risk to zero. Geffen eventually settled and apologized, after which Young switched back to his previous label.
Since then, he’s grown his autonomy and his fanbase so much he’s started releasing Neil Young Archives to distribute deep cuts including whole albums from the ’70s he was unable to release before.
Somer of the best music Neil Young made in the 1970s, though Young himself didn’t think so at the time, was when he was fucked up on lots of drugs and — so the story goes — depressed by the expectations he had set by his 1972 hit album, Harvest. “Heart of Gold” was so successful that he felt he couldn’t live up to those expectations, and instead made rambling strung-out folk-rock jams that later became huge hits themselves. On Tonight’s the Night, his voice cracked and notably slurred on several songs; in On the Beach, he ranted cryptically about Charles Manson and bemoaned “pissin’ in the wind.” The live album Time Fades Away chronicles a tour that was so messy and alcoholic that Neil Young straight up refused to reissue the album on CD until 2014. Fans ate that shit up, and the out-of-print vinyl LP was a hot collector’s item for years.
The rantings of a frustrated burnout are still celebrated by depressed burnouts decades later; fans just eat that shit up. Though seemingly uncomfortable with success, Young still managed it strategically to expand his creative ambitions. Once again, Olson’s meme prowess sums it up best:
So, without further ado, here are 10 of Neil Young’s most underrated songs from 1970–2000, in chronological order:
