From the Graveyard
I dug up the bones of a first draft about bad Christian culture criticism and Taylor Swift
Every draft of every article I write has a graveyard: an appendix of sentences, fragments, lists, and phrases that didn’t find a place in the draft, but didn’t deserve full deletion. Usually it’s just an extra page at the end of the document. When I create the fresh, submittable version, it gets left behind.
My graveyards sit, rarely revisited, in old first drafts. They eventually get buried in my Google Drive folders, and I forget about them. Recently I was re-reading some early drafts of articles I’ve written for Christianity Today, retracing my steps. My graveyards, it turns out, are full of some interesting bones. So here is the first installment of an ongoing series: “From the Graveyard.” Periodically, I’ll post some recently-rediscovered fossils and reflections on why I discarded them. Maybe those posts will spark some conversations or deeper engagement with a topic.
Often, the bones in the graveyard are places where I indulged myself a little too much. I got too polemical, or started reaching. In some cases I wanted to bring in a source or voice that muddied the narrative a little too much. There are tangents and redundant passages (I have a tendency to write around and around an idea). Often, things simply get cut for length.
Showgirls and The Virtue of Listening or Not
I don’t usually do straightforward album reviews, not because I don’t think they are worthwhile, but because my music coverage for Christianity Today aims to be more conceptual or reported. However, when Taylor Swift dropped Life of a Showgirl last year, it seemed worthwhile to give consideration to the latest album by arguably the most influential figure in the entertainment industry.
This particular article went through more revisions than usual. As you can imagine, covering an album like this for CT required some careful framing and hedging. I’m not a fan of morality-policing pop music, but I think it’s fair for readers to wonder why I would write about this album for a Christian magazine.
Truthfully, I was first interested in writing about the reception of the album, not the album itself. It has some earworms, and I appreciate the tight construction of songs like “The Fate of Ophelia” and the dramatic contrast between the verses and chorus of “Elizabeth Taylor,” but when the album dropped, I was most fascinated by the ways people performed their relationship to Swift’s music online. In hindsight, the first draft of my essay about the album was a little…smug and preachy. I’m happy with the revised version that ended up published.
Here’s a passage that didn’t make the final cut. I stand by it.
Publicly and loudly performing one’s abstention from the enjoyment of a Taylor Swift album is, in my opinion, the lowest-hanging fruit of Christian media commentary and content-creation. It’s a way of participating in the discourse when you have nothing to say about the art in question, but you do have something to say about yourself.
Most of us know that the 24 hours after the release of a Taylor Swift album bring a tsunami of takes. Social media is completely overrun by a race to post a spicy opinion (often about Swift herself rather than the new music), seemingly in the hope that it goes viral and sparks a war in the comments. Don’t come at me, Swifties, but…
The day after The Life of a Showgirl dropped, the discourse had devolved into fragmented skirmishes over the Max Martin vibes, the motown callouts and modulations, the (at times, cliche-burdened) lyrics, Swift herself, and of course, her relationship with Travis Kelce. “Is Taylor Swift becoming a trad wife?!” “This song is so clearly a rip-off of x!” “This is dull, mid pop.” (I have to concede that the title track does sound a lot like “Cool” by the Jonas Brothers.)
And then there were the Christian takes; Christian content-creators know they can generate some traffic and ride the Swift-generated momentum by posting about why they don’t listen to her music, or why they don’t let their children listen.
The album hadn’t been out for a full day when contemporary Christian music (CCM) darling Forrest Frank and fellow Christian artist Josiah Queen posted a video featuring the two looking at the camera and laughing at the question, “did your family listen to the new Taylor Swift album today? (mind-blown emoji).” Cut to footage of a toddler dancing and watching a music video of Frank and Queen (the video is set to their song, “Jesus is Coming Back”).
The caption of Frank’s video says, “not throwing stones… but it’s Jesus music for us over here (touchdown/praise hands emoji).” This is “safe for the whole family” marketing for a new generation of CCM fans and artists.
“The way you consume art doesn’t make you a bad person, or a good one. You’ll have to find some other way to accomplish that.” writes Claire Dederer in her book, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. Dederer explores the complications of listening to music made by predators and abusive music moguls and stars, something that is almost impossible to avoid for any music fan. I often think about this quote when I see Christians posturing about their media intake.
It’s not surprising that Christian content-creators use moments like this to publicly stake out a position on a pop culture phenomenon. It’s an opportunity to find more of their desired audience. But a statement of choice or preference that comes with the qualifier, “as a Christian” isn’t really just about preference. It’s a claim about what it looks like to be an ideal follower of Christ.
In 2014, after publishing a review of The Wolf of Wall Street in Christianity Today, critic Alissa Wilkinson wrote about why a Christian publication would engage with R-rated films and media with disturbing or explicit content. Wilkinson, now a critic at the New York Times, wrote, “It is not for me to decide for you whether you should see a particular movie. That’s something you’re responsible to decide for yourself, with wisdom from your community, your conscience, and the authority under which you’ve been placed.”
Christians who have a strong aversion to explicit content in a piece of media want to believe that our reactions and discomfort are informed by the Holy Spirit. Hopefully, they are. But that doesn’t automatically make them universal or generalizable, and that can be difficult to accept.
If you’re a Christian who wants to engage in cultural discourse online in a constructive way, that work probably starts with learning to listen to a burdened conscience while resisting the urge to insist that anyone without that same burden is in the wrong, or too “worldly.”
An encounter with music is a conversation, not a waterboarding. A song doesn’t force ideology or invade your mind with hidden messages; it doesn’t possess you or change you against your will. You get to have an interaction with it, and your response depends on what you bring to that encounter.
No one wants to be the one with a “weaker conscience,” but sometimes my aversion to a particular piece of music or film is just mine, because of who I am and the life I have lived. Maybe, in this case, “weakness” is more aptly understood as “sensitivity.” Graciously acknowledging that I am sometimes the one with the weaker or more sensitive conscience is the best way to approach differences in opinion when it comes to content in film, music, or literature.
You can dislike Taylor Swift. You can think her music is boring, cringe, or too explicit. But when you pick up a phone to post your opinion, do you have something more to say about it than, “As a Christian, here’s why I don’t listen to Taylor Swift?”
Thanks for reading! As always, here are some recommended reads and listens:
I’m currently reading The Lost Art of Dying by Lydia Dugdale as I prepare to teach a fall seminar called “Death and Dying” in our theology department. It’s an engaging, thought-provoking book that I think will be an ideal discussion-starter with my students. If you, like many modern Americans, tend to avoid thinking about your own mortality, this book is a great entry point that is neither overly clinical, nor unhelpfully sentimental.
Someone once told me that you know you’ve reached middle age when you get interested in Steely Dan. I’m thirty-seven, is that middle-aged? Probably. Anyway. I’ve been listening to Aja.
Thank you for this piece. I thought I was the only one with a graveyard of darlings I had to let go. I feel seen!
Before I go, I want to recommend a great essay along the lines of Dederer’s book that helped me process some of my baggage regarding my appreciation of secular music having grown up in a very “as Christians we don't listen to that” home.
In last spring’s issue of Image magazine, Jayme Stayer, a former professional musician, now Jesuit priest and professor of English at Loyola University, wrestles with his instinctual appreciation of music from artists he personally knows to be morally compromised in an essay titled “What Do We Do with Monstrous Musicians?”
Thanks for this, Kelsey. To me, there's a huge difference between "critics who engage with art and are Christian" and "Christian critics." I much prefer the former over the latter, for all the reasons you mentioned.