TAYLOR SWIFT

To be perfectly honest, I had no idea who Taylor Swift was until Kanye West showed up. If you'd asked me, I would have made a broad guess that she was another Disney-built pop tween. There was good reason for this - I was far outside her audience. But once the ball of controversy began rolling, her scope began to expand and before I knew it, she was unavoidable. And that's when I started to hate her.

At first, it had less to do with her and more to do with the media's wild overreaction to the Kanye incident. What should have been a silly and memorable awards show moment was transformed into a traumatic national incident, the process of which throbbing with an intense but strictly unacknowledged undercurrent of racism.

To put it mildly, the media's reaction pissed me off. In the year after the incident, Swift rode the wave of anti-Kanye vitriol to superstardom and did nothing to quell the overreaction. Her 2010 album Speak Now even features a weepy ballad to a thinly veiled subject, forgiving Kanye for his crime, which is treated with all the grim seriousness of a rape.

My love for Kanye West may bias me in judging Taylor Swift, but I've found far more troubling elements to her music in the two years since I became aware of her. Swift is championed by critics and public alike for a number of reasons: she is a young woman who plays an instrument and writes her own songs, and she represents a more positive role model to young girls than most pop stars today. The first point is one I could argue but I will not - concerns about authenticity in pop music are inherently foolish and Swift's songs are just as obsessively studio polished as any current day pop song - but the second one is really worth taking a look at.

The further you look into her music, you begin to realize that Taylor Swift is a feminist's nightmare. Feminist culture site Autostraddle did a remarkable analysis of Swift's music last year, one which is far deeper than I have the space to tackle here and well worth a read. The basic points are this: Taylor Swift, an adult woman, often take the perspective of an innocent, disempowered teenager. Her songwriting relies on repetitive, tired, teen romance imagery. She claims "outcast" status despite being beautiful and seemingly loved by everyone. And most importantly, her songs are almost always about boys and how their love will make any girl's life complete, and rarely ever about other girls unless she is slut-shaming them.

Listening to Speak Now, I was surprised at just how much Swift had grown, in comparisons to the songs I'd heard from her last album. She no longer seemed quite so obsessed with teen romance and more in tune with adult issues - the title track's wedding day drama could be seen as a deliberate attempt at aging Swift's image out of high school. I can't say the music isn't palatable either - her voice is lovely and the tunes are wonderfully catchy. Despite all this, her songs still strike me as overly passive and boy-crazy. The sarcastic quips and giggles of "Better Than Revenge" are refreshing, but she falls back into familiar tropes with lyrics about what the other girl "does on the mattress" and equating her with a bully on the playground stealing toys. "Never Grow Up" is a desperate plea to a little girl to stay a child forever, as Swift apparently wishes she could have.

The realization I came to while listening to Taylor Swift's music is that, as much as I may disagree with the way she portrays life and the messages she sends to young girls, I am in the minority. In fact, laying out all the above facts, things which I deem ugly and indicting, would only reaffirm to many parents why Swift is exactly the kind of role model they want for their daughters.

Ever since she was thrust into the spotlight on live TV, Taylor Swift has been both lauded and condemned. I can't see myself ever agreeing with the image she portrays, but I think I can understand why so many people reject the hedonism of artists like Kanye West and embrace the wholesome idealism of Taylor Swift. I guess I'm just too cynical to go for it.