It's not about whether or not I like her music, which I largely do, it's about people feeling just fine about telling blatant lies about her, as you have. That is misogynistic.
Art is largely subjective so if you don't care for her music, that is certainly your right, but if you do respect Dolly Parton, why don't you respect her assessment about Swift's skill? And why are you claiming that Swift doesn't really write her own songs when that is demonstrably false?
"Cindy Walker, who wrote some of the greatest songs ever and of course Loretta Lynn, wonderful wonderful songwriter," Parton said. "And this day in time, of course, Taylor Swift, she's just right up there, probably number one."
And how much of Swift's music have you actually sat down and listened to, I wonder because critiquing it without actually knowing much about it is just more misogyny. There is a lot of poor pop music out there today, but none of it's coming from Taylor Swift.
These U of Oregon professors of music have a very different assessment than you do.
“We can’t talk about Taylor Swift’s success without acknowledging her preternatural ability to write songs that are familiar yet distinctive, accessible but not trite,” Associate Professor and Chair of Popular Music, Toby Koenigsberg, says. “It’s important to emphasize that it’s incredibly difficult to write a song like the songs Taylor writes,” he adds. “It's difficult to do even one time. To do it across an entire album is much harder still, and she has been doing it on album after album for close to two decades now.”
“Taylor Swift is really good at writing music,” Associate Professor of Music Theory Drew Nobile notes. “That's indisputable. She knows how to craft a melody. The subjects of her songs are very relatable. I’m a 38-year-old male and I can listen to her songs, even those she wrote when she was 20, and connect with them.”
These Harvard music professors concur:
"She has a lot of different gifts as a songwriter, both at the macro level, how the song tells a story or presents an attitude, and at the micro level, how the vowels and consonants fit together, and she’s able to exercise that range, along with quite a lot of melodic gifts, and in a way that does not make her seem highbrow or alienate potential audience members. I would not be surprised to discover that her body of songwriting altogether had a larger number of words than any body of comparable hit songs by a comparable songwriter, except for someone like Bob Dylan.
One of the things that’s really remarkable for me about her is that harmonically, she’s not usually that interesting. It’s pretty normal pop chord progressions and pretty standard varieties of pop arrangement. Her great genius and her innovations and her brilliance as a songwriter is melodic and verbal. And, of course, she’s also very good at singing, which is not to be sneezed at. But she’s able to do that within the fairly tight constraints of existing, easily recognizable chord progressions and rhythmic setups."
