Friday, March 8, 2013

Is there any way for me to opt out of Taylor Swift?


I have no interest in hearing the music of Taylor Swift, getting any details on her personal life, or hearing any commentary on her music or personal life. There must be some kind of app or filter that will keep this person out of my life. I do not actively seek out Swift but there will be times when I cannot avoid hearing her music or seeing gossip about her pop up online. I wish to opt out of this experience entirely and I wish modern science would invent a way for me to do so. I have extreme apathy, bordering on antipathy, about listening to one note or one syllable of Swift’s music. A song that I think is called “Love Story” will sometimes be playing on the radio when my alarm goes off and I begin to resent even those scant minutes I endure until I rouse myself to shut off the alarm and her voice. The song is tolerable until she compares her boyfriend and herself to Romeo and Juliet respectively, seemingly unaware that those characters died for reasons that are not so much romantic as tragic and stupid. I heard “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” and despite its critical plaudits, found it annoying and boring to the point where I was ready to fall unconscious during the first chorus. I just … I don’t get it. From what I read, Taylor Swift seems very immature and petty, not so much for writing songs about breakups but writing songs about anyone who pisses her off, like Kanye West or the critic who said she was off key during a performance. Swift is a person who overreacted to harmless jokes that Tina Fey and Amy Poehler made about her and implied that those women belonged in a special place in hell. I have no interest in an entertainer that hilariously thin-skinned. Her music has nothing to say to me and I want nothing to do with it. I also have absolutely no desire to know any more about who this woman is dating. I was reading some gossip about her love life and I just thought, “What am I doing here? Why am I reading this? Why do I care?” And I looked quizzically at the heavens and had one of those moments where you just question how you got to that point and where your life is heading. To an extent, I have wasted part of my life in reading about this person. It can be fun to read celebrity gossip when you’re bored but I have to admit that who this singer dates just does not impact my life and does not at all arouse my curiosity at all. I couldn’t be less interested in whether she dates John Mayer, Jake Gyllenhaal, that guy from the boy band or whatever Kennedy descendant. I don’t care if they break up and I won’t listen to a song about it. I don’t care about her life or what happens to her. She’s just … some person, you know? I care about her as much as I could care about any of the 10,000 faceless extras in a Cecil B. DeMille epic. Most of all, I turn a profoundly disinterested eye toward any commentary on What Taylor Swift Signifies About Feminism or whatever faux-intellectual subject people write about the singer. I will not be grading your doctoral dissertation and have no power to confer a degree so please save me the trouble of having to read your in-depth analysis of a pop singer. I know you will say the solution is “Then don’t read anything about her or listen to her music” but it’s not that easy to avoid a celebrity completely when her image is so pervasive. That’s why I wish there were a solution for me to opt out of experiencing her on any level. Maybe when a song comes on the radio, some technological advance could instead let me hear a song I actually care about. Maybe when I’m on a website and see an item about Swift, science would enable me to see a pretty painting or a recipe for chocolate cake. I just wish modern science would advance to the point where this would be possible. I just want Taylor Swift to leave me alone. 

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