Haters Gonna’ Hate
Last night I took the plunge and rented the video of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, and it is rather amazing. Normally I wouldn’t spend $20 to rent an online video, but I certainly wasn’t about to pay $450 to get a bad seat in a large stadium for one of her concerts, surrounded by the much younger crowd that she attracts. I’ll leave for later what makes an old man a Taylor Swift fan, albeit not exactly a Swifty, just someone who really enjoys her music.
So why would I feel the need to write this post? Actually it was spurred by the coincidence of my watching Swift’s performance and the Grammy Awards. Although Luke Combs didn’t win for his rendition of the Tracy Chapman song Fast Car, his duet with Tracy Chapman was a worthy highlight of another tedious awards show. If you couple that with Miley Cyrus’ award for Flowers, it signals a profound cultural moment.
First, you have a middle-aged white, male, country music star performing a duet with the dread-locked, now-graying black singer/writer of a song that is a lament about a young, black, urban woman’s life. Combs doesn’t try to change the song’s point of view to rural instead of urban or even to a male instead of a female perspective. Yet the song clearly resonates with him and his country music audiences as he’s noted that he’s been performing that song live for 6 years to enthusiastic response.
How does that happen? If you’re not familiar with Fast Car, you should listen to it. It’s a wonderful song about a young woman who gives up school to take care of her alcoholic, loser father since her mother gave up on him and left. The singer thinks she has found a way out with her boyfriend with the fast car that makes her forget her miserable life working in a convenience store and coming home to deadbeat Dad. That exhilarating combination of love and speed in her boyfriend’s car leads her to dream of a middle-class life in the suburbs with a striving two-income family. Instead she finds herself the only one working with several kids by the father who ignores her and his kids and just hangs out in bars drinking. Now, substitute fentanyl for alcohol and transpose it to a small-town rural setting, and you have a surprisingly shared experience, only differing in irrelevant details.
And that leads us to…, Miley Cyrus and Flowers, winner of best song. I wrote a whole essay on The Flowers Phenomenon. In addition to a young woman finding more fulfillment in life on her own rather than with a romantic partner, that song also resonates with young people’s isolation when most of our human interaction seems to take place online-the last place for honest one-on-one sharing of any personal depth. Social media with its crippled version of English and its character limits and its substitution of emoji for body language is no place for the commingling of souls. The two songs, each in their own way, lament our current culture as described in Men on Strike by Dr. Helen Smith.
What led to these threads coming together in my mind was a small detail. You see, during the Chapman/Combs rendition of Fast Car at the Grammys, the camera widened for a moment, showing that Taylor Smith was so moved that she stood up from her table of celebrities to sway and maybe even sing along with the two on stage. Reportedly, many on social media immediately responded as if Swift were trying to upstage Chapman and Combs instead of her obviously celebrating what we both perceived as the most important and moving moment of the night. That spurious accusation is dramatically ironic if you’re familiar with the infamous incident at the 2009 Video Music Awards when Kanye West literally took the microphone out of the 21 year-old Swift’s hands as she was accepting her award to faux apologize to her as he denigrated her video as a poor second-best to that of the mortified Beyonce. If you’re not familiar with the title of this essay, it’s from Swift’s song Shake it Off which is her response to the slings and arrows of social media by someone who even gets abuse for attending her boyfriend’s pro football games.
And now, you know the rest of the story.
Originally published at http://frank-hood.com on February 6, 2024.