"Jack White Clarifies His Comments on Taylor Swift's Music, Dismissing Any Claims of It Being 'Boring'"] - Guitar | Technique

Oh dear. Jack White has got himself in a right old kerfuffle regarding his comments about songwriting and a certain pop megastar.

You may recall that yesterday in a Guardian interview about his songwriting, White offered what could be taken as a mild criticism of Taylor Swift’s autobiographical approach to lyric writing.

Talking about confessional songwriting, his exact words were: “It’s become very popular in the Taylor Swift way of pop singers writing about all of their publicly aired break-ups, which I don’t find interesting at all.

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“I think it’s a little bit boring for me to write about myself. Even if I’ve had a really interesting day, I feel like I’ve already lived that, I don’t need to go through it every time I sing this song.”

Big mistake.

Several publications republished his words and misquoted him to imply he found Taylor Swift “boring”. Before he knew it, White was having to defend himself from the online onslaught. As we know, the Swifties are ever-vigilant when it comes to policing criticism of their heroine.

Anyway, White attempted to put the record straight in a Facebook post, saying he wanted to “put this to bed.”

“I didn’t say that I think Taylor Swift’s music was ‘boring’ or whatever click bait the net is trying to scrape together,” he began. “What I was trying to say in an interview I did about poetry and lyric writing was that I don’t find it interesting at all for ME to write about MYSELF in my own lyric writing and poetry because I think that it could be repetitive for ME to always write about and it could be uninteresting for people who listen to my music to delve into, and that imaginary characters are more attractive to me as a writer.”

Essentially, his argument is – to quote the late great Sly Stone – different strokes for different folks: “Taylor and other singers have tremendous success writing in their own styles, and I’m very happy for them that they’ve succeeded in engaging with so many music lovers in their own way.”

“Just because I say I have a way of doing things doesn’t mean that I think that EVERYONE should do it the same way. They should do what works for them, and they do, and it is obviously appealing to many people, and I’m glad to hear that.”

He also made an interesting point about how in the age of click bait “any scrape of anything interesting or off the beaten path that can be turned into drama is swarmed over and spit out as bait, leading me to not want to answer questions with any sort of romance or passion or reflection as I’m too busy having to worry about accidentally triggering nonsense like this.”

And pointing out the circular irony in all this, he said: “It encourages artists to give ‘safe’ answers to any question and stifles artistic vision and imagination and pushes all of us to not share anything interesting, which was one of the points I made about keeping private things private in that same interview.”

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