The mainstream and the niche

I recently had the experience of talking to someone, also a 20-something woman, who used the phrase, “I love all music except Taylor Swift.”

I’ve been thinking about taste lately; whether I have it, whether I care about it, if it’s possible to cultivate it. Unlike this woman but like most other people, I like Taylor Swift a lot. My housemate and I just watched the 3.5-hour Era’s Tour concert movie and I enjoyed every minute. Because Taylor covers so many years of her career in this concert, I found myself thinking about the kind of music listener I was: at age 11, 18, 22, 27.

In middle school, I don’t remember being particularly aware that my music taste might be “wrong” somehow. I remember trying to force my brother to listen to “Picture to Burn” while we brushed our teeth, convinced as I was that this song would enamor him of Taylor’s lyrical prowess. When he remained unsold, I didn’t second-guess myself; I just told him he was wrong.

I never stopped listening to Taylor Swift, but I did stop listening to most other country and/or pop music by high school. I loved finding some sort of folksy artist whose songs only had a few thousand streams on Spotify. I also started listening to relentless quantities of indie rock (The Killers, The Shins, Cage the Elephant), which I still genuinely enjoy but came to appreciate largely because boys did not think it was stupid.

Around the time I got to college, I mostly just started listening to things I liked. It was so freeing—so vindicating—that I might have overcorrected. For a year or two, I listened almost exclusively to music I felt men might ridicule, as though I were paying penance for caring too much before. The idea of being basic felt subversive. According to this Wikipedia page on the word “basic,” basic interests include: white Converse, crop tops, Nike sneakers, leggings, and brunch, which is to say, all of my clothing and my favorite meal. Once, in college, I remember using the elliptical machine while watching Friends on my phone with an iced coffee in one Hydro Flask and carbonated water in the other. Surely, this was not a useful workout. But after years spent trying not to be like other girls, I now reveled in the idea of being Exactly Like Other Girls—I was a satire of myself.

My knee-jerk reaction when someone says they don’t like Taylor Swift is that they’re naysaying the popular to prove a point, which I know is unfair—I’m sure some people feel they have legitimate reasons (though, honestly, whatevs; they can make their own stick figure newsletter).

I recently read Stay True, a brilliant and beautiful memoir in which the author, Hua Hsu, who writes about music and culture for The New Yorker, reflects on the formation of his own taste: his desire to be perceived as a tastemaker; his navigation of the balance between the mainstream and the niche. As a college student, he reaches for cultural artifacts as a means of identity formation. It’s obvious to see you’ve done this when your taste has undergone a shift—when you can look back on artifacts you once flaunted that no longer represent “you”—but all of us are doing it all the time. You are always becoming the person who reads that type of book, listens to that type of music, wears that type of shoe.

If I feel this from the perspective of a media consumer, I feel it even more acutely from the perspective of a writer. Putting your name on a book and putting that book out into the world is a massive statement about the self—even if, internally, it feels like the parts of your heart or mind within the book are too limited to capture your full self. I ask myself all the time what it means to write commercial versus literary fiction, young adult versus adult. What does it say about me? How does it make other people perceive me and the points I’m trying to make? Does it change how I feel about myself?

I think this is part of the enduring magic of Taylor Swift. She has been so many things—an artist of many genres, but also a character cast to fill many media stories. Watching the concert movie, I was struck by her ability to embody so many different sides of herself. They’re personas many 20- and 30-something women want to slip in and out of themselves—she can be sentimental (“Love Story”), pensive (“the 1”), driven (“You’re On Your Own Kid”), sexy (“Vigilante Shit”), sincere (“Long Live”), clever (“Mastermind”), and able to endure and come out the other side (“Karma”). And she does all of this while looking beautiful and confident and generally like she’s having a great time. Who doesn’t want this?

What drives so many of us, I think, away from the popular and toward the niche, is that we’re afraid we can’t be more than one thing. If we listen to popular music or read popular books, we’re part of some lowest common denominator. We worry we can’t be smart, or insightful, or multi-faceted. If we like things no one else likes, we can’t be typecast; our music, and thus, our selves, remain unknown to everyone else. I am regularly terrified of being boxed in by expectations—society’s, or a partner’s, or a reader’s. But it would be so much worse to never allow yourself to be known at all.

Currently reading: Eve by Cat Bohannon, courtesy of my mom (thanks, Mom!). Only halfway through but this is peak science writing. Makes you stop and highlight every few pages, but also very funny!

Non-urgent thought of the week: Is everyone else listening to way more country music in the past six months? Just me? I don’t know what’s going on but please get in touch if you have theories.

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