Swift Kick in the Pants

Taylor Swift is the biggest thing since I stopped caring what the next big thing is. I might never have noticed except that my 11-year-old daughter has now officially schooled me.

Phoebe is an exceptionally sheltered child. Her mother is an ex-punk-rocker-turned-strident-Waldorfie [2]. We forbade any screen time—no TV, no computers, and certainly no iPod. This is ironic, since pop culture literally paid our mortgage for many years back when I was a music critic in the post-Nirvana '90s. As I recall, music started to suck about the time I became a father, and I’d happily traded in my backstage pass. In my new role, I saw how messed up our culture is by age fetishism: Adults want to be kids and kids want to be adults, no one is ever happy where they’re at, and the media plays a huge part in this game.

More to the point, some girls are getting their periods [3] at age 8 these days. At Wal-Mart, they sell “No Boundaries” thong underwear for 9-year-olds [4]. My anachronistic father-knows-best remedy for this has been a form of denial, of course, but one that’s easy to rationalize for a G-rated audience. “Most of your life you’ll have adult privileges and problems,” I tell Phoebe. “Be a kid while you can.”

But my daughter doesn’t want to be a kid anymore. She idolizes a leggy 19-year-old pop star. Turns out even our quasi-Amish parenting couldn’t keep Swift’s music out of our daughter’s ears. Last year, she was the best-selling artist of any genre. She’s the only country musician ever to put a song at No. 1 on the Billboard mainstream Top 40, and she’s done it twice within a year of graduating from high school (“Love Story [5]”  and “You Belong With Me [6]”). Forbes ranks her among the 70 most powerful entertainers in the world.

I know that the mainstream world Swift rules is full of inappropriate underthings and screwed-up priorities, so I have to wonder: Is she too grown up for Phoebe? My 11-year-old prepubescent "Waldork" (Phoebe's word) is fully hooked on Swift’s saccharine, grammatically progressive high-school love songs like “Fifteen [7]” ("When you're 15, and someone tells you they love you, you're gonna believe them"). Is Swift teaching my daughter to define herself by her relationships to bad boys and the frustrating quest for Prince Charming? Should fairy-tale romance be on such heavy rotation in my preteen daughter’s playlist?  I decided to further investigate, coincidentally earning maximum Cool Dad Points, by taking Phoebe to see the final concert in Taylor Swift’s 2009 “Fearless” tour.

Starring in her first headlining tour, Swift seemed caught in a perfect moment. I’ve never seen an artist spend so much time between songs just standing there grinning, apparently soaking in the sellout crowd of 15,000. The 19-year-old was awkward in a charming, unselfconscious way. She took head-banging to a whole new level with those 20-inch-long blond ringlets. I gather she’s been too busy writing and performing to take professional dance lessons; as she pranced and jigged, she was as loose-hipped as a dog shaking after a bath, all elbows and knees, as exuberant as a sophomore in sweats, singing into a hairbrush in her bedroom. “She’s a kook!” said Phoebe approvingly. “Just like in her videos!”

If I had to spout a rock critic’s stream-of-consciousness while watching Taylor Swift, I’d say she’s Miley Cyrus minus the split personality [8] (and the bad studio rock that goes with it); she’s bigger than Paris Hilton and Britney Spears minus the drama and the slumming; 19 going on 20, and she still lives with her parents. In her between-song patter, she offers light-handed homilies about life being bigger than high school, about dreaming and daring to be different. But mostly she’s talking about taking names and kicking butt when it comes to no-good, double-timing, callow boys—natural, I suppose, for a person who landed a songwriting contract [9] in the seventh grade.

After the concert was over, I realized that, far from corrupting my daughter, Taylor Swift may be making me a better dad: She’s helping me loosen my overprotective grip on my daughter. Her songs are as girl-power-positive as they are hummable. Offstage, her idea of mischief is making a hilarious rap parody of herself [10] or catching up on the History Channel [11], and she’s engaged in more charitable acts than I’ve managed living twice as long as she has. She’s a serial philanthropist, a perennial donor to the Red Cross; she’s teamed up with Tennessee authorities to help protect kids from online predators; she’s loaned her song and her branding to at15.org [12], a Best Buy foundation that allows kids to choose charitable causes to which the company will make donations. It all makes me wonder whether there’s a seat waiting for Taylor at the Justice League of America [13].

I asked Phoebe how she liked the concert. “I like her even more now,” she said. “She really seems like a person you could just talk to.”

OK, but you know, what about hypersexualization vs. empowerment or male-defined femininity, not to mention the troubling conflation of country music with top-40 pop? I screwed up my courage.

“What’s Taylor Swift’s music about?” I asked. “I mean, to you?”

She said, “Boys.”

“Well, what about them?”

“Don’t be bad, or Taylor Swift will write a song about you.”

Which would be cute and harmless, except the song is likely to be heard by everyone on the planet. Phoebe gets that. And whatever else you can say about Taylor Swift, it makes me happy that she believes one girl’s music can make the world a better place, one boy at a time.