Tuesday 15 December 2015

In defence of being a Taylor Swift fan girl.


I consider myself to be somebody with decent taste in music. I’m not saying I’m a music maven by any stretch of the imagination but on the whole I enjoy some damn good tunes.  I like approximately 80% of what they play on BBC6 Music so if that doesn’t make me ‘cool’ and ‘hip’ I don’t know what does.

Generally I like my melodies with a heavy side of melancholy: Bon Iver, Frightened Rabbit, The Smiths, The National, to name but a few. But I also have a massive place in my heart (and my headphones) for the tremendous tones of Taylor Swift. From her cutesy country beginnings to her pure pop perfection, her music simply makes me happy.

So-called cool kids claim to like Tay-Tay ironically but I am an unashamed Swiftie, with 2 t-shirts and a pair of Taylor Swift maracas to prove it. Is there such a thing as a guilty pleasure? Shouldn’t we just feel good about listening to music that we love?  Some of my favourite memories this year have involved dancing with reckless abandon to ‘Shake it off’.

Then there’s the debate about Swift as a woman; she’s too nice, she can’t hold on to a man, how dare she remove her music from Spotify. She’s a young woman whose whole life is playing out in the public eye, I think she does a pretty good job of holding her shit together. And with a celeb squad made up of some of the coolest ladies around, she’s obviously got something going for her.

For impressionable young girls, she’s a role model: a kind, goofy girl who talks about the importance of self-worth and sings songs about being hurt. She is the youngest woman ever to be included in the Forbes 100 Most Powerful Woman list. Yes, I am a Taylor Swift fan girl, and proud of it.