Sisters With Voices (Patreon)

Miss Americana (Lana Wilson, 2020)

Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice (Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, 2019)

These two very different documentaries, profiling two very different women musicians, are instructive not only about the way that the music industry has changed over the last thirty years, but also how sexism, like all viruses, has mutated in order to survive in the face of significant shifts in its host environment. Both of these women are superstars in what remains a male-dominated field, and both of them have had to tackle that challenge head-on. But a comparison of Linda Ronstadt and Taylor Swift shows us that the importance of identity, understood as a form of corporate branding, has in many ways supplanted previous notions of musicianship. It can be perceived as a "rockist vs. poptimist" problem, but I think it runs deeper than that.

Miss Americana is a fully authorized look at Taylor Swift's development as an artist and as a person(ality). It has been favorably compared with other recent examples of official portraiture, such as Justin Bieber: Never Say Never and Katy Perry: Parts of Me, and with good reason. It doesn't just focus on the crafting of her stage persona or the workshopping of material in the studio, although it certainly does that. It also features Swift discussing the problematic aspects of being a female megastar in the 21st century. She addresses the lack of privacy, the way the media has slut-shamed her, her struggles with body image and eating disorders, and eventually shows her abandoning her red-state friendly apoliticism in order to fully embrace left-of-center causes such as feminism and LGBTQ rights.

Whether or not one is a fan of Swift, it is hard not to admire her work ethic. She and her collaborators take their craft very seriously and the studio segments display her perfectionism when it comes to engineering high-quality pop records. But Miss Americana displays a paradox that Swift seems to recognize, on a certain level, but can never fully articulate, much less escape. She wants to come across as a regular person, with insecurities and a nearly-pathological desire to please. But sincerity is her brand. She laments the fact that others see her actions as calculated, but as long as she chooses to operate within a massive-scale corporate organization for the dissemination of her music, she cannot really expect to simply be an emotionally direct creative figure. She will always be the masthead for a corporate behemoth, and so a gesture such as Miss Americana can at best be an ambivalent expression of pop star malaise.

Swift's changes always seem to be formed around her sense of self. Remember the Old Taylor, who can't come to the phone because she's dead? This is an interesting contrast to Linda Ronstadt, whose career was characterized by a number of formal and artistic shifts, rather than the adoption of new personae. Never a songwriter, really, but chiefly a stylist of other people's songs, Ronstadt had a unique instrument which was her voice. (Sadly, she is no longer able to sing because of progressive supranuclear palsy.) Ronstadt was never particularly shy about her personality or opinions, but her work was primarily about understanding the parameters of her instrument and weaving it around songs whose structure and timbre would best be served by that instrument. It wasn't about personal revelation or confession, although one could certainly feel her investment in the material she selected.

So when Ronstadt chose change, it came in the form of new genres and avenues: Gilbert and Sullivan, the Nelson Riddle album, or Canciones de mi Padre. She was more interested in music as cultural phenomenon than as a vehicle for the articulation of self, and in this regard, a career like hers probably cannot happen in the same way today. The 1970s was an experimental era when artists of all stripes were looking outward to history and society, broadening the political concerns of the 60s to include a certain self-reflexive interest in their chosen medium. Today, for better or worse, popular music is virtually all about staking out a place for one's identity, and asking listeners to accept it and/or identify with it. (This has been especially pronounced since the late 80s and early 90s rise of hip-hop as pop music's dominant formal innovation.)

Ronstadt's longevity as a singer and musician, then, seems to have been largely attributable to her investment in exploring music as a broader cultural phenomenon, a social practice that could bond communities by transcending the self. One wonders what sort of long term career Swift might have as a singer-songwriter, given that she makes herself the locus of all of her creative work, and the listener is drawn in, presumably, by their interest in Swift and her sometimes-quirky, frequently-melodramatic interpretation of her own existence. The pop audience is fickle, and staking all one's chips on being and remaining a compelling personality is a big risk. But then, from music and cinema to education, science, and politics, the freedom to follow one's own star, irrespective of broader social context, is the order of the day.