traveling soldier – The Red Pen of Doom

Yes, this is a music video, and we will play it because MTV resolutely refuses to do their damn job. Have a look and listen, then we will TALK ABOUT ALL THE THINGS.

First off, I come here to talk smack about lyrics, not the actual music video. The video is fine. It’s not blowing my mind and it’s not making me close my eyes and chant a lullaby to make it go away.

The words are what we are here for, and the words are GOOD.

Dissecting the lyrics, but not in an icky dead frog way like biology class

Let’s go after the first few lines:

Half of my high school got too drunk
Half of my high school fell in love
With the girl next door
In their daddy’s Ford
Half of my main street’s mini skirts
Half of my main street’s dressed for church
It could use some rain
And a fresh coat of paint

Such a great way of painting a picture of her hometown and the people who live there without giving everyone the same hues and textures.

Because let’s be honest: half of all pop songs are about getting drunk, and half of all pop songs are about falling in love, but few pop or country songs dare to have a lot of nuance or subtlety. They’re more likely to hit you over the head with a single message, like, “I’m on a BOAT!” then repeat that message six hundred times.

Now, the chorus:

Half of my hometown’s still hangin’ around
Still talkin’ about that one touchdown
They’re still wearin’ red and black
Go Bobcats, while the other half
Of my hometown they all got out
Some went north
Some went south
Still lookin’ for a feelin’ half of us ain’t found
So stay or leave
Part of me will always be
Half of my hometown

Oh, here we go. I don’t really have a home town, being born on a military base we left after a year. Kept on hopping around bases in the Germany and the Holland and the New York–so if you put a Glock to my noggin and asked me for a single detail about my hometown, couldn’t tell you a damn thing. Throw a blindfold on me and ask me whether an F-15 or F-16 is flying overhead and I’m you’re man.

However: we now live in a one-stoplight logging town, where half the town does show up to wear maroon and gray every Friday night and is still talking about that one touchdown. So I feel these lyrics in a way that Justin Bieber could never reach me with the lyrics of his masterpiece, “Baby, Baby, Baby.”

Half of our prom queens cut their hair
Half of them think that it ain’t fair
The quarterback moved away and never came back
Half of my family is happy I left
The other half worries I’ll just forget
Where I came from
Same place where they came from

I could not love this more. Beautiful lyrics and they do touch on the touch choice facing anyone from a small town: stay for family and neighbors and friends, or leave for opportunities and dreams. Totally get that.

Now we get the chorus again, so I’ll delete that chunk and give you the next real bit. Say hello to the bridge and the closing:

Backroads raise us
Highways they take us
Memories make us wanna go back

To our hometown, settle down
Talk about that one touchdown
Raise some kids in red and black
Go Bobcats, while the other half
Of my hometown was in the crowd
They knew the words
They sang them loud
And all I wanna do is make them proud
Cause half of me will always be
Knoxville, Tennessee
My hometown
My hometown

Heard this song again and again, making the ending anything but a surprise. I know exactly what is coming. And the last lines still hit hard.

VERDICT

Here’s the deal: I enjoy pop songs and Angry Indie Acoustic stuff far, far more than country music. However: country and rap songs tend to tell this thing we call a story. They also get more inventive with lyrics, echoes, and reversals with wording.

The Chicks song, TRAVELING SOLDIER, is a freaking masterpiece.

Do the lyrics to MY HOMETOWN do the job? Paula Abdul would say, “Yes, yes, a thousand times, YES!” but she’d mean it and Emelio Estevez would mean it this time and they’d still be married today. Ben Affleck and J. Lo, do not listen to this song, move to a small town, and get married to each other or another human being again. Hold off for a decade or two.

Kelsea Ballerini nails it in a few hundred words. Seriously, count them up. If you don’t count the repeated chorus, it is shocking how few words she uses to do a complicated job of making us see her hometown and feel all these choices and people.

11/10, beautiful job, give us more more MORE.

I come here to praise Taylor Swift, not to bury her CGI zombie corpse.

Though I’m neither superfan nor hater, I have to say she did some great music videos early in her career. YOU BELONG TO ME is excellent. BACK TO DECEMBER is pretty good.

This music video is a step backward, an expensive mess that shows T-Swift has fully evolved from a Scrappy Young Talent Who Just Hit It Big all the way to a Establishment Megastar With More Mansions Than She Can Remember.

Yes, the production values are great. Fans will watch the heck out of this just for the spectacle.

HOWEVER: It doesn’t make you feel anything.

At all.

And that’s the acid test for a music video.

Do you laugh?

Do you feel joy, or anger?

Do you cry?

That’s because whether you intend to or not, every song tells a story. A music video is supposed to help tell that story.

Songs don’t give you a lot of words to do the job. It takes discipline and talent to do it right.

The Dixie Chicks can spend 200 words to tell a full story that makes you full of sorrow (TRAVELING SOLDIER) or righteously angry (GOODBYE, EARL).

Taylor can do this, too. She has the talent to tell a story and make you feel. One of her first big hits did this perfectly. It’s even in the title.

Here’s where this new video goes wrong, despite all the money spent–reportedly, $12 million in diamonds was used for that bath scene.

What story is she telling, and how does it make us feel?

In her best songs and videos, Taylor’s telling a story about somebody else, somebody we can all relate to, and that makes us feel for the protag. YOU BELONG TO ME is about a high school girl, something of a loser, with a crush on a neighbor boy. People get that. Whether you’re male or female, we’ve all been through awkward years in junior high or high school. It’s easy to feel for the girl she’s singing about, and to root for that underdog. You want her to get the boy and it’s a great moment when they both show up to the dance together.

In this video, Taylor’s clearly talking about herself, and the point of the song is to strike back at perceived rivals.

It’s hard for non-billionaires to feel sympathy for celebrities with hurt feelings. No matter how good the song is (and it’s not that good compared to her best) and how much they spent making this video, you can’t force people to feel sorry for a young, pretty woman who makes more money in a week than most people will make in their lifetime.

What are the stakes?

Just like books and movies, songs can have low stakes or high stakes, personal stakes and public stakes.

They can be about whether love rules the day or love forever lost. War or peace, injustice or redemption.

The stakes here are extremely low. Oh, Taylor is so upset (at Katy Perry or whoever, I honestly don’t care and neither should you) that she crashed a car that costs more than your house while a a cheetah served as her copilot. With her car trashed, will she be unable to get to work in the morning and lose her job? Does it matter in the slightest? No. She may have to tell her staff to gas up the Ferrari, or the Bentley, or one of however many dozen cars she owns. People will clean up the mess while she goes off and trashes one of her jets and rounds up an army of cloned robots or whatever to assault the compound of P-Diddy or whoever she’s mad at this week.

Basically, I can’t make myself care, and yes, I tried. Really hard.

What’s the impact of the song and video?

The best songs and music videos stick with you. AMERICAN PIE was about an entire era, and half the fun was trying to decipher the lyrics. Even if you didn’t get every line, you got the message about how America was changing. It sticks with you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ih7N9_VUU4U

EVERY BREATH YOU TAKE is about love turning into obsession, and the video is stark black-and-white. I wouldn’t change a thing.

When I first heard LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO on the radio, I swore it was Britney Spears.

Not kidding. Feels like mid-stage Britney, after she’d made it big, and started doing over-the-top stuff like this:

Verdict: Sure, the production values and budget is sky high, but the entertainment value is meh and the feels generated are zero. 10/10 would not watch again.

If the old Taylor Swift is dead, and the new T-Swift is busy being obsessed with her hurt feelings and celebrity beefs, let’s resurrect the old Taylor Swift–the one focused on songs that aren’t about her. I’d happily listen and watch that singer.