Arts

Swift Kick in the Pants

Is Taylor Swift corrupting my daughter? Or uncorrupting me?

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. 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 at age 8 these days. At Wal-Mart, they sell “No Boundaries” thong underwear for 9-year-olds. 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”  and “You Belong With Me”). 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” ("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!”

Tags: fatherhood, music critics, nirvana, parenting, taylor swift, waldorf schools

Hans Eisenbeis is a former editor at Spin and Request magazines and lives in Minneapolis. He is a senior editor at Iconoculture.

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