As a teenage girl, I understand what it's like to be a teenage girl. I understand stress of high school, feeling insecure at high school, and wanting to impress, kiss, and/or punch boys...at high school.
While my music taste falls into the indie rock category, there are many deviations. These deviations range from my immense appreciation of 80's and 90's hip-hop to my inability to resist catchy Top 40 tunes. One deviation, country music, used to be a much larger portion of my palate. While I still have a soft spot for the Dixie Chicks, I no longer scout country tracks and find most of it, sorry, nauseating.
There is, however, one country singer that my teenaged estrogen and I can't resist: Taylor Swift. Yeah, her songs are pretty generic and not in the least as innovative as the music bands like Grizzly Bear or Vampire Weekend are cranking out. But here's the thing: everything she croons about shoots directly to the lovestruck ventricles of girls my age. In interviews she chats casually and candidly like that girl from biology class who was always so friendly to everyone and you felt like you could be best friends with.
As I said, her songs are simple. They follow the same verse-chorus-bridge-verse-BIG CHORUS! structure and 90% are about boys. The way I see it, there's nothing wrong with that. She's nailed what appeals to her demographic and hey, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Fearless, released yesterday, is only Swift's second album, but the teen beauty is already primed to be an icon. For the past few weeks, I couldn't leave a class without hearing a girl hum a chorus from "Love Story" or "You're Not Sorry," two of her new singles. Today there was a abundance of shared iPod earbuds as doe-eyed damsels in adolescent distress bonded with Swift's ballads. I can't think of a comparable teen heroine from decades past, but for this millennium, Swift fits the position of female paragon just fine.
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