But I don’t really think that this is indicative of any genre-crossing in Swift’s work or in the presentation of her star-image – I think she chooses them because they’re “pop songs,” songs whose melodies and lyrics she likes… she happens to be a young performer at a time when a certain vein of modern RnB is the default “pop” genre, so those are the songs she covers. I think rather than entering another genre in performing these songs, she is more trying to evacuate the songs of their generic specificity, revealing that lying behind the studio pyrotechnics and expensive videos of these hits are the timeless ingredients of ‘good songwriting’ – heartfelt lyrics, sing-along-able melodies, familiar yet original chord progressions, all those clichés one finds in songwriting manuals… She’s starting to do the same thing with the country genre in her more recent songs, maintaining certain generic conventions but evacuating much of their specificity, their territoriality. It is what people often refer to as “selling out,” but leaving aside the pejorative interpretation, it’s interesting just to notice how such an act functions in a time of globalisation, and specifically in the internet era.

We’re forever being told that things like ‘guilty pleasures,’ genre-territoriality, etc., have been rendered obsolete by the internet – it’s so easy to just download a Taylor Swift song, so easy for a metalhead to watch a bunch of Raekwon videos on YouTube and learn about rap music, and in the end it all gets homogenized, filling up some space on the hard drive, listed alphabetically in the iTunes library. We don’t need to be territorial in our tastes anymore, everything is so available that this restrictive discourse can be dispensed with and we can just listen to ‘what we want’ to listen to – if one of our friends calls us a loser for listening to Artist X (who is too commercial, too weird, too uncool, too hipsterish, or whatever) it is the friend who in fact reveals him/herself to be uncool, to be living in the 90s, still so closed-off and monolithic… Swift’s covers can be understood in this same context I think, willing us to free ourselves from the restrictions of personal taste and to just realize the goodness of everything, the universality of music… It’s a move that is simultaneously very conservative and very contemporary.

I can’t really process it at the moment, so I’m just going add more great moments in Swift-ian documentation.

It’s interesting, in the light of Kanyegate, that one of the celebrated points of the Taylor Swift ‘narrative’, besides her supposed authenticity, is her genre-crossing inclinations. To wit: her appropriation of Hip Hop and RnB.

Thus:

Taylor Swift covering Beyonce’s ‘Irreplacable’: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JTex90YoHk

Taylor Swift covering Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself’: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4WQPfMzK10

and covering Rihanna’s ‘Umbrella’: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLpeeeraVJQ&feature=related