Good artists borrow, great artists steal.
~ Pablo Picasso1
Every contact leaves a trace.
~ Edmond Locard
Long-time reader Bernard Walker has written a letter to the editor of the Herald on Sunday (HoS Sept 15.) to tell us that Auckland University of Technology’s proposed Taylor Swift Studies course is “not as far-fetched and worthless as Peter Cook (HoS Sept 8.) may think”. Walker makes the case for Swift with withering sarcasm, proposing questions that the course could ask about Swift’s success, like “Is it because she dresses and moves in a provocative manner on stage?” It’s perhaps the ultimate sign of being out of touch with pop culture and craving for a past-that-never-was to see Taylor Swift, of all people, as a siren of our times. The sirens, after all, were dangerous. According to Apollonius of Rhodes, Terpsichore, the muse of dance and dance music, was their mother, but if Taylor Swift is one of her children then Olivia Newton John in Xanadu is the only avatar of Terpsichore you have in mind.
Two old men, or perhaps young men with old ideas, dissing Swift in the dated style of Letters to the Editor can only take Swift Studies so far. There’s a lot to take seriously in pop, and in some ways Swift is the right subject - as a parasocial phenomenon, and as a example of the brain’s response to sound, her audience’s experience is valid and generalizable. We can all feel like Swifties when we hear the right song, if we’re lucky. And, given that academia makes everything dead boring, it’s best in the long run that whatever inspires you and me stays off-limits. But there’s something a full century out of date about using Swift as our example to study the music industry, how popular music is made, sold, and publicized. It’s like studying Queen Victoria to understand social conditions in the 19th century. What people used to do before the Marxists got involved. Take for example, Swift’s #MeToo moment; when groped by some sexist DJ, she was able to crush him like a cockroach, without impeding her progress, and with no obvious consequences for anyone but the perpetrator. This is not how these encounters have played out for other female artists. Similarly, it seems regressive to study Swift in the field of communications when it’s guaranteed that attention will be paid to her words and deeds, today perhaps because of her popularity in and of itself, but in the earlier stages of her memefication because her backers paid big payola bucks, as they still do, to have her songs playlisted, and to make and keep the gatekeepers interested in her, rather than being guided by their own senses to become interested in more intrinsically interesting, more innovative, and of course likely far less safe feminine subjects.
Still, you can’t stop progress, so here is my own contribution to the growing field of Swift Studies.
TS, as a songwriter and collector of production styles, is an apex assimilator, taking ideas that were once charged with danger and exploiting them at great personal safety. We can see this with her processing of Lana Del Rey’s style; whatever it is in the original that makes us feel rightly uncomfortable in our enjoyment of it has been carefully taken care of. You’d need to be as out-of-touch as Bernard Walker to mistake it for the real thing. In Music - A Subversive History (2019) Ted Gioia describes how new musical ideas tend to first appear from marginalized individuals and communities, where they are associated with sex and violence and magic and altered states, and arrive in the mainstream of commerce after a process of rejection, grudging acceptance, cooling off, watering down, and assimilation - the burden of risk from this falls on the originators and early adopters, the assimilator only needs to deal with the problem of “authenticity”, and even this is being ironed out intellectually (that Pablo Picasso quote being one of the tools for disarming it).
There’s a great example of this process of assimilation on Swift’s The Tortured Poet’s Department. I listened to this album when it was central to the discourse, and wished I hadn’t. A great wet hanky of a sound, the last gasp of pastel synth pop, it was simply too bland and dispiriting to engage me, despite the interest of her new “slice of life” lyrical direction (again, inspired by Lana Del Rey). But I came to realise that Swift had one good song, the single ‘Fortnight’, and I realized this in an unusual way, when DJ Earworm recognized its similarity to New Order’s ‘Bizarre Love Triangle’ and posted this mash-up mix on Twitter.
To get the brilliance of this song, just imagine that Bernard Summer wrote the words. Once you can’t unthink that, it’s yours to enjoy. But is TS “ripping off” New Order? Those are just three chords, not uncommon chords in Pop and Dance music, and TS in her own version hasn’t used much of New Order’s dance-influenced styling. It’s not as blatant as the recent ‘Where is my Mind’ Pixies steal of Jessie Reyez f. Lil Wayne’s ‘Ridin’, and that’s unlikely to land them in court.2
The backstory of the TS-New Order link may have laid forever cloaked in mystery were it not for my impulsive purchase of Gwen Stefani’s 2004 solo debut Love. Angel. Music. Baby. for $1 at the New Lynn Hospice Shop. I bought this, despite having always found Stefani annoying as fuck, on the strength of Courtney Love lauding ‘Hollaback Girl’ on her Courtney Love’s Women radio series. Stefani wrote her super-aggressive hit track (I’m not going to use the word '“song” here) in response to Love dissing her as “a cheerleader”, a great example of something we don’t see enough of, female musicians inspiring each other by making their beefs public. ‘Hollaback Girl’ does interesting things, veering away from its taunting cheer chorus into gentler byways, their subtleties a bit lost in the harsh hambone rhythm. Love. Angel. Music. Baby. is an album where the rhythm always hits you over the head, even in the softer songs - it was an essay in re-inventing 80’s radio pop styles, inspired (as Stefani told Rolling Stone) by Club Nouveau, Depeche Mode, Lisa Lisa, Prince, New Order, the Cure, and early Madonna. I certainly hear Madonna in some vocal inflexions, but Madonna was a limited singer who made the most of what she had, and Stefani has the chops of an opera star.3 She’s the most rococo of all pop singers, the mechanical nightingale from Hans Andersen’s fairy tale, if the nightingale were a magpie. The best tracks are those where the insistent beats fit her energy and there isn’t too much unnecessary variation and detail - the opener ‘What You Waiting For’ (co-written with Linda Perry of 4 Non-Blondes, who wrote the dire ‘What’s Up’ and the fantastic ‘Get This Party Started’) is a motivational banger with a similar theme to Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself’ and Kanye West’s ‘Gorgeous’, its spirit intensified under the additional pressure the industry places on a female star like Stefani, who’d already made five albums with No Doubt, to cash in before she’s “too old”.
Look at your watch now
You're still a super hot female
You got your million dollar contract
And they're all waiting for your hot track
What you waiting for?
Take a chance you stupid ho…
The other standout, from my 2024 perspective, is ‘Bubble Pop Electric’, produced by and co-starring Andre 3000 (under the moniker Johnny Vulture), a drive-in back-seat love song that critics compared to the Grease movies. Really? It’s much better than that, whipping up perky comic-book eroticism over a hammering rapid-fire triplet beat, a perfect counterpoint to OutKast songs like ‘Spread’.
It’s interesting to identify the features that, 20 years on, date these tracks. Both of them feature a guitar part that would be dropped today. It’s almost as if guitars are only included to appease the No Doubt fans. ‘Bubble Pop Electric’ is also dated by the four-part harmonies on the backing vocals, at least when they’re left exposed on the breakdown, an unnecessary nod to the past - its nostalgic frame of ‘50’s teen romance isn’t really what this track’s about anymore - so much has happened in the past 20 years that its reimagined past has become as futuristic as Bowie’s ‘Drive In Saturday’.
Aesthetically, Love. Angel. Music. Baby. suffers from Stefani and her producers putting, and leaving, too much in. There’s only one track, Wendy and Lisa’s CD bonus “slow jam” version of ‘The Real Thing’, that’s pared back enough for the song itself to fully shine. But the album proper version of ‘The Real Thing’, produced by Nellee Hooper, who produced ‘What You Waiting For?’ and those classic Björk albums Debut and Post, is the point of interest today. Because ‘The Real Thing’ sounds like a mash-up of ‘Fortnight’ and ‘Bizarre Love Triangle’. Hear those distinctive New Order bass licks? They’re being played by Peter Hook himself, and Bernard Summer is singing the Post Malone part.
Bitch stole my look. But who wore it best? Swift scores an easy point by making the ‘Bizarre Love Triangle’ bit the whole of her song, which is all it needs, whereas Stefani writes her own chorus, wherein she also references Madonna’s ‘Holiday’.4 These days it’s important not to break the mood like this, but I’m warming to Stefani’s desire to bring New Order and Madonna together in this way. And, good though I think Swift’s touched-by-the-hand-of-God lyrics are -
All my mornings are Mondays stuck in an endless February
I took the miracle move-on drug, the effects were temporary
And I love you, it's ruining my life
I touched you for only a fortnight
Stefani’s are better -
I've seen your face a thousand times
Have all your stories memorized
I've kissed your lips a million ways
But I still love to have you around
I've held you too many times to count
I think I know you inside out
And we're together most days
But I still love to have you around
You're a salty water ocean wave
You knock me down, you kiss my face
I know the storms will always come
But I still love to have you around
Heavens knows what will come next
So emotional, you're so complex
A roller coaster, built to crash
But I still love to have you around
Swift is dwelling on the lasting effects of her short-term liaison, which is all very childlike, whereas Stefani is digging into adult themes of familiarity and the emotional complexity it reveals - the consequences of love. Wikipedia paraphrases the sleeve notes, too tiny for me to read, like this:
”During songwriting sessions for the album, she approached New Order with an idea that they would collaborate with her on a song. Because they were in the process of creating original lyrics for their eighth studio album, Waiting for the Sirens' Call (2005), they declined her offer, leaving Stefani to write a song in the style of the group instead. However, after hearing the track she wrote, they decided to play on it, explaining that they admire Stefani as an artist and were also recently impressed by a remix of her debut single ‘What You Waiting For?’“
(Possibly this version, the intro of which samples Madonna’s ‘Hung Up’)
Of course Taylor Swift, and her co-writers Jack Antonoff and Post Malone, know the work of New Order and Gwen Stefani well. And I don’t see anything wrong with borrowing a few chords from an old song to pay tribute to it, as Stefani did, or even if you think you can improve on it by doing your own thing over it, as Swift did. But the extensive Wikipedia page on ‘Fortnight’ states that it’s 80’s influenced without mentioning New Order (or Gwen Stefani). Instead, we get comparisons to make you tear your hair out - “Clash's Lauren Webb wrote that the track had a 1980s power ballad sensibility reminiscent of such artists as Roxette, Cutting Crew, and Phil Collins.” In other words, as far as today’s music press is concerned, the New Order sound arrived at Swift’s place already assimilated into what the mainstream was in New Order’s own time.5
Who were New Order anyway? They were Joy Division, as renamed after the suicide of singer Ian Curtis. Joy Division, four young men from the deprived suburbs of Manchester, who named their band for the term used to describe the sex slaves in Nazi concentration camps in the 1955 novella House of Dolls by Auschwitz survivor Yehiel De-Nur (as Ka-Tsetnik 135633), a book which, according to Holocaust scholar Ronit Lentin “represents violence and sexuality in a manner which borders on the pornographic”. Their musical formula, the most original of the so-called post-punk scene, fused rock sounds with dance rhythms, and when they performed their singer, Ian Curtis, seemed to enter a shamanistic trance; the influence of Jim Morrison, Nico and Iggy confirming their allegiance to music-as-magic. They were thus associated, in one way or another, with most of the stigmata common to the innovative, disruptive music that the mainstream fears, yet must always assimilate to renew itself, these being, according to Ted Gioia’s thesis in Music - A Subversive History, sexuality, violence, trance and altered states, and even the ritual sacrifice of a scapegoat (for those who saw the suicide of Curtis, at the age of 23, as in some way a validation of the band’s commitment, ethos, or authenticity).
Joy Division, self-released at first, later on an independent record label, were successful in their day, and certainly noticed and given credit in the press for their innovations, even by those who disapproved of their aesthetic. New Order, after picking up an additional influence, house DJing, from another marginalized community across the Atlantic, were able to engineer their own mainstream acceptance (or something like it), as the story of ‘The Real Thing’ shows. Unfortunately, the music press, and the rest of the music industry, is no longer structured to assist the rise of innovative working-class musicians, and better structured to appropriate their ideas, albeit in superficial ways.
What remains of the music press is increasingly a closed shop, a place for the corporate music business, never in itself artistic, always existing to exploit the talents of others, to live in an echo chamber with little exposure to anything but the fantasies of its own publicists. The charts are also closer to being a closed shop than they’ve been since the 1950’s (at least the 50’s had separate charts for marginalized genres like “race music” and “country and western”), because streaming plays are being counted, and these are not necessarily organic expressions of interest in or desire for a song. Most music listeners are lazy, and where they used to listen to the radio, now they’re likely to stream, or wander unknowingly into streaming, algorithmically generated playlists. I’ve even heard radio programmers admit to doing this. And such playlists only include music that’s bought its place there; artists with major label backing, which buys playlist position wholesale, or independent artists who’ve been forced to find the means to buy a little. Plays in these lazily tolerated, thoroughly payola’d playlists, when no longer separated from organic plays or downloads, are no measure of artistic worth or even a meaningful indicator of popularity. Everything is fake.6 And this is to say nothing of nepotism, rarely a problem when music was a less lucrative occupation, and academic favouritism, rarely a problem when musicians were expected to be dumb louts.
One of the things I’ve tried to do in Songs From Insane Times is introduce the artists making the music that will need to be assimilated in 20 or 40 years time (though one of modern life’s horrors is how accelerated this process might become) by whatever bot replaces Taylor Swift, in the hope that creators of works of innovative genius can enjoy the credit this deserves. If you’ve been reading my posts for a while you’ll know all about this, and if you haven’t read my back issues, you really really should.
Alseeyouincourtgorithm - The Flaming Lips, ‘Fight Test’
P.S. Jamey Danger insisted that I link to our actual Poetry Is Theft album here. Apparently you’re not supposed to stream songs with another artist’s name in the title without their permission. Huh.
Picasso didn’t say this, and TS Elliot said it best, but the fact that it gets attributed to Picasso instead of Elliot proves the point; Picasso, without even trying, has stolen Elliot’s idea, just by being the memetic ideal of a Great Artist. If a lesser thief artist, say Damien Hirst, had borrowed it, it would have been returned to Elliot long before now.
“One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.”
T.S. Elliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, 1920
Tyler McCauley at The Unskippables reports that Bruno Mars is suing Miley Cyrus “for “Flowers,” whose intertextuality with Mars’ “When I Was Your Man” was kind of the whole thing that made it cool and smart? And definitely shouldn’t require royalties? Lame!” I’ve never liked Bruno Mars, and now I never will..
There’s a great deal of Lene Lovich in Gwen Stefani’s vocal mix. Her reasons for not giving credit to this influence at the time may range from “bad feng shui” (Lovich was never popular or successful) to not wanting to give too much credit away for something that, while done before, was also the result of her own hard work. Influence is a complicated thing.
Back in the 1980’s, feminist academics were still lamenting that “we look in vain for a feminine tradition in art”. Two decades later, they could have easily found one in popular music, and traced it back to the ‘80’s (at least).
Compare that dreck with this review of Love. Angel. Music. Baby. by Jody Rosen from 2004, inspired stuff that puts Stefani’s work in context and explains it perfectly. Swift Studies majors are going to have to wade through several lifetime’s worth of half-informed cut-and-paste waffling if the gigantic wikipedia entries for her individual songs are anything to go by.
“In a scheme federal authorities are labeling “brazen fraud,” a North Carolina man allegedly used artificial intelligence to create hundreds of thousands of songs, then continuously streamed them using bot accounts to generate unlawful royalty payments totaling more than $10 million".”
Ted Gioia, in 2019, reported that 100,000 bot-driven Spotify plays could be bought for $299. This was, presumably, the legal trade, Spotify’s everyday business model that the North Carolina man has merely taken too far.