Taylor Swift "Speak Now" [2010]

It's as if country music had always been hermetically sealed and never exposed to the elements, least of all the scrawny little Barbie doll at the helm of the entire procession (although look closely enough and you, too, will see the corporate puppet strings attached). Taylor Swift -- the lottery-winning cutie of LA-via-Nashville, or Nashville-via-LA -- takes country twang back more steps than Shania Twain and Faith Hill did a decade beforehand combined; the Chipmunks have more soul than whatever "Speak Now" is trying to emote. Had Hank Williams managed to stay alive until 2010, he surely would have OD'd a second time at hearing what Taylor Swift -- her handlers, that is; everybody with the capacity to reason blames Dick Cheney a lot more than George W. Bush, after all -- had done to his genre. That moneyfied dickwads have descended vulture-like onto modern country music only makes me feel sorry for a style of music I could not have given less of a shit about previously. So even though Taylor Swift may only be conscious of doing nothing more than passing up a bite of that sandwich, in reality she's much more complicit in the overall undermining of society, and as such ranks below intellectually vacuous porn stars, in my estimation -- at least they have the capacity to get me off.