At about 11:26 Sunday night, several of my friends suddenly became very, very angry.  As the culmination of the music industry’s year-long effort to make sure that Taylor Swift never runs out of shiny metal objects, the 2010 Grammys named the country crossover superstar’s Fearless the “Album of the Year.”  Her competition included the Dave Matthews Band, Black Eyed Peas, and the other two dominant women of pop music, Beyoncé and Lady Gaga.  The vast majority of the “how the **** did that tone-deaf hack win?” outrage came from Team Gaga, and understandably so.  While DMB, BEP, and Beyoncé are long-established and well-awarded artists, Gaga has managed to strut her way through several months as the biggest story in music without garnering any major awards.

Lady Gaga is by far a more interesting artist than Taylor Swift.  She’s developed an endearingly disturbing public persona, and her performances are almost exclusively ridiculous and awesome.  Swift, meanwhile, is a bland interview and an embarrassingly terrible live singer.  But in some ways, Swift’s Fearless and Gaga’s The Fame are pretty similar.  Both women have a frightening ability to churn out catchy pop hooks, and both use the same subject matter over and over.  Gaga sings over dance beats about partying, having sex, and being famous; Swift sings over dreamy guitars about dating, growing up, and learning important life lessons.  And there’s the real difference between the two: The Fame is a statement from a young, sexually comfortable woman, while Fearless tells the story of a child.

Taylor Swift is 20 years old.  Lady Gaga is 23.  And yet they seem to exist in entirely different worlds of female experience.  Gaga goes to clubs, meets attractive boys and girls, and then encounters the inevitable complications.  For all of her lace face mask and fake blood wearing ways, her music reflects the real sexual and romantic lives of many Americans her age.  But Swift, though an adult thriving in a high-pressure career, writes about love as if she were a fifteen-year-old.  Literally: the album’s fourth single is a track about the disappointment of first high school love, titled “Fifteen.”  Her two biggest hits to date are “Love Story,” an explicit Romeo & Juliet riff that ends with an accepted proposal and the purchase of a white dress, and “You Belong with Me,” an unrequited crush narrative that centers around being jealous of a cheerleader.  Love is simple for Swift (when it works, it works forever, and when it doesn’t, the boy is stupid), and more importantly, it is chaste.  “Fifteen” tells the cautionary tale of Abigail, who “gave everything she had to a boy who changed his mind.”  The paramour in “Love Story” specifically asks the girl’s father for her hand.  Swift’s earlier smash, “Our Song,” complains that a couple should have kissed on the first date but didn’t.  Sex is a foreign, scary thing, only mentionable in the context of someone else’s mistakes.  Fearless is a young woman’s opus on how girls should be afraid of their own sexual desires.  And it’s your album of the year.

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    Last reviewed: 3 Feb 2010