Todd Rundgren: Taylor Swift Ruined Music

Few major artists are willing (dumb enough?) to criticize recent Cleveland devotee Taylor Swift in public, lest they incur the cursed wrath of her loyal fan base (or the pop star herself). However, Todd Rundgren, secure in his status as one of the last great rock curmudgeons, has absolutely nothing to lose. The rock legend recently spoke with Vulture’s Devon Ivie for a winding conversation about his career, from touring with Ringo Starr to his history with various members of the Band. Eventually, talk steered toward Rundgren’s production work on Meat Loaf’s seminal 1977 album Bat Out of Hell, which he has admitted he saw “as a spoof of Bruce Springsteen.” So, if Rundgren produced that album now, who would be his target?

“Taylor Swift, of course,” he told Ivie (Full disclosure: I previously worked with Ivie at Vulture.) “There’s an argument to be made that she ruined music. It’s an understandable phenomenon. It’s just that, to me, Taylor Swift is the apotheosis of mediocrity.” Rundgren then went on a winding and extremely nonsensical tangent about how the biggest artists in the world are now women because boys in the ‘90s started spending money on video games instead of music? Not sure about that one, Todd! “That left the music market with, ‘Well, where do we go here?’” said Rundgren. “And they said, ‘Well, there’s all these young girls and they’ve got their allowances, too.’”

By the end of his reply, he had again brought it back to Swift: “Taylor Swift doesn’t do anything particularly great except grow hair,” he added. “She’s not a great singer. She’s not a great songwriter. She’s not a great dancer. She’s a role model for what was a very young generation of women, and now for those women’s daughters as well, because it’s mothers and daughters going to Taylor Swift shows.”

Swifties, before you burn your copies of Something/Anything?, feel free to send it over here first, I need a new one.

Alex Suskind has overseen music coverage for New York magazine’s Vulture and, before that, Entertainment Weekly. He has written about TV, film, technology, politics, and tons of other stuff for The Guardian, Vanity Fair, and The Fader. ... Read More