Daily Beast article. Archive.
Penn Jillette. Published Dec. 30, 2023 8:00PM EST
A young friend recently gave me a Taylor Swift album to listen to and after playing it on repeat I soon found that the pop star had captivated me like Joni Mitchell.
Whenever someone is talking about their favorite music, I estimate their age, and then when they became sexually active. After that I do a little arithmetic–simple addition. If the music they’re raving about seems like it was released plus or minus two years of the first time they had an orgasm in the presence of another person, I don’t trust their taste. They aren’t talking about music—they are talking about sex.
Music does many complicated things, and it fulfills many needs and performs many functions. A lot of those are sex and romance, and, sex and romance are the same thing.
I’m not just talking about what song was (I’m wicked old) on the turntable when you were first getting down. I’m talking about (yeah, that old) what was on the turntable when you thought about it a couple years before and after.
If I start talking about “Maggie May”, tell me to shut up because that was July 1971, and that wasn’t plus or minus years, that was right on the nose, so to speak. But if I’m talking about Bach, Miles Davis, Blondie, Eminem or Chainsmokers, I might have something to say.
During that sexual window where musical taste doesn’t count, The Beatles were shoved down my throat and I bought it hook, lines, and middle eight. I thought they were great. The Get Back documentary really made the embarrassing point that The Beatles didn’t bother with lyrics, but I listened so much that I invested in their empty lyrics with my whole life. Those words mattered to me and still do. Writing stuff that can be projected on is a wonderful skill, not simple at all. The Beatles made some of the best music ever for people having shared orgasms plus or minus two years. And it still fulfills that function well.
Speaking of orgasms, let’s talk about my children. I get so creeped out when friends of mine brag that their children listen to Zep or The Who. I think for the sex thing, they should have their own music. My children mostly have control over what’s played in the car. I like that. And 21 Pilots and Imagine Dragons seem as good as The Beatles for their purposes.
Bob Dylan is outside the sex window for me. I started listening before my sex window and I’m likely to be listening to Bob on my deathbed and if I die in a car crash, it’s likely Bob will be singing on the sound system. Bob isn’t like the Beatles. Dylan is like Shakespeare, he writes about love and sex, but ... there’s more there and it’s timeless. So what about this Taylor Swift? We develop our associations in music, not just from sex, but also from familiarity.
Now that I’m old enough to have had sex with a turntable in my youth (take that any way you want), I don’t listen to anything, not even Mingus, Miles, Sun Ra and all the other jazz I listened to daily as many times as I listened to The White Album. But I decided to get familiar with something that’s popular right now.
If I want to compare with The Beatles I needed someone who was comparable in hype to then in 2023. I asked a young friend who is a Swifty to give me an album that I could wear out the groove on (metaphorically). She suggested Folklore, so I pulled it up and dug in.
I tried to listen to Folklore the way I listened to The White Album or Blonde on Blonde, (two of the records I’ve listened to over a thousand times. There has likely not been a day since 1968 that I have not listened to Dylan and probably not a week without some Blonde on Blonde.)
First, I listened carefully to Folklore. I carefully read the lyrics as Taylor sang. I listened while assigning what events in MY life she’s singing about. I asked personal questions about problems I’m trying to work out and looked for the answers in her songs. I sang along (sorry, Taylor). I put it on in the background while I worked. I played it while driving. I played it in bed. I just played it and then played it again and again. I did NOT try to find out what inspired her songs for real, who Taylor was having, or not having sex with when she wrote each song. I know when Dylan was writing about Suze, Sara, John Lennon and Allen Ginsberg, but I learned that much later. I wanted my Taylor pure; I wanted her singing about my life.
At first, I was impatient. When I appeared on a show called Sabrina, the Teenage Witch my friend, Nell Scovell, the writer of that show, tried to give my character, Drell (essentially Satan), only lines that she had heard me say IRL. So, I was quoting a character quoting me, “The problems of teenagers are SO interesting.” That happened to also be my first reaction to Folklore. Lots of teenage sex problems, but you know, Bob Dylan mostly writes songs about fucking. So you can’t fault Taylor for that.
Then it started to happen. Snippets of Taylor would sneak into my conversations and, more importantly, into my thoughts. I was thinking while using her words. Her songs became my ideas. Wow, she’s good. Wow.
And I listened and listened and listened. Even before I listened to Folklore as much as The White Album, Taylor was there. I need less familiarity to feel it. She creams Cream and Zep. She’s not Miles, Stravinsky, or Zappa, but that’s a different category—she’s writing pop, and she’s writing it well. Really well—Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen well.
That’s more than enough to make her a hero for 2023. This year has been full of assholes—I’m surely not going to pick a politician as a hero. Taylor is brilliant, wonderful, hardworking and as far as I know is doing nothing to continue wars and kill people and it doesn’t seem she wants to be a dictator and destroy our democracy. Those are all pluses for me.
Is she writing Bob Dylan, Shakespeare well? Ask me again in 50 years, and I’ll give you an opinion. For now it was so nice to listen to real pop music and be able to have it become part of me, even this many years after I fell in love to “Maggie May”.
“In my defense, I have none ...” I’ve listened to Ms Swift enough now that this brilliant line from “The 1” seems to sum up so many things in my personal life. It might be better even than, “All you did was wreck my bed and in the morning kick me in the head.”
Penn Jillette. Published Dec. 30, 2023 8:00PM EST
A young friend recently gave me a Taylor Swift album to listen to and after playing it on repeat I soon found that the pop star had captivated me like Joni Mitchell.
Whenever someone is talking about their favorite music, I estimate their age, and then when they became sexually active. After that I do a little arithmetic–simple addition. If the music they’re raving about seems like it was released plus or minus two years of the first time they had an orgasm in the presence of another person, I don’t trust their taste. They aren’t talking about music—they are talking about sex.
Music does many complicated things, and it fulfills many needs and performs many functions. A lot of those are sex and romance, and, sex and romance are the same thing.
I’m not just talking about what song was (I’m wicked old) on the turntable when you were first getting down. I’m talking about (yeah, that old) what was on the turntable when you thought about it a couple years before and after.
If I start talking about “Maggie May”, tell me to shut up because that was July 1971, and that wasn’t plus or minus years, that was right on the nose, so to speak. But if I’m talking about Bach, Miles Davis, Blondie, Eminem or Chainsmokers, I might have something to say.
During that sexual window where musical taste doesn’t count, The Beatles were shoved down my throat and I bought it hook, lines, and middle eight. I thought they were great. The Get Back documentary really made the embarrassing point that The Beatles didn’t bother with lyrics, but I listened so much that I invested in their empty lyrics with my whole life. Those words mattered to me and still do. Writing stuff that can be projected on is a wonderful skill, not simple at all. The Beatles made some of the best music ever for people having shared orgasms plus or minus two years. And it still fulfills that function well.
Speaking of orgasms, let’s talk about my children. I get so creeped out when friends of mine brag that their children listen to Zep or The Who. I think for the sex thing, they should have their own music. My children mostly have control over what’s played in the car. I like that. And 21 Pilots and Imagine Dragons seem as good as The Beatles for their purposes.
Bob Dylan is outside the sex window for me. I started listening before my sex window and I’m likely to be listening to Bob on my deathbed and if I die in a car crash, it’s likely Bob will be singing on the sound system. Bob isn’t like the Beatles. Dylan is like Shakespeare, he writes about love and sex, but ... there’s more there and it’s timeless. So what about this Taylor Swift? We develop our associations in music, not just from sex, but also from familiarity.
Now that I’m old enough to have had sex with a turntable in my youth (take that any way you want), I don’t listen to anything, not even Mingus, Miles, Sun Ra and all the other jazz I listened to daily as many times as I listened to The White Album. But I decided to get familiar with something that’s popular right now.
If I want to compare with The Beatles I needed someone who was comparable in hype to then in 2023. I asked a young friend who is a Swifty to give me an album that I could wear out the groove on (metaphorically). She suggested Folklore, so I pulled it up and dug in.
I tried to listen to Folklore the way I listened to The White Album or Blonde on Blonde, (two of the records I’ve listened to over a thousand times. There has likely not been a day since 1968 that I have not listened to Dylan and probably not a week without some Blonde on Blonde.)
First, I listened carefully to Folklore. I carefully read the lyrics as Taylor sang. I listened while assigning what events in MY life she’s singing about. I asked personal questions about problems I’m trying to work out and looked for the answers in her songs. I sang along (sorry, Taylor). I put it on in the background while I worked. I played it while driving. I played it in bed. I just played it and then played it again and again. I did NOT try to find out what inspired her songs for real, who Taylor was having, or not having sex with when she wrote each song. I know when Dylan was writing about Suze, Sara, John Lennon and Allen Ginsberg, but I learned that much later. I wanted my Taylor pure; I wanted her singing about my life.
At first, I was impatient. When I appeared on a show called Sabrina, the Teenage Witch my friend, Nell Scovell, the writer of that show, tried to give my character, Drell (essentially Satan), only lines that she had heard me say IRL. So, I was quoting a character quoting me, “The problems of teenagers are SO interesting.” That happened to also be my first reaction to Folklore. Lots of teenage sex problems, but you know, Bob Dylan mostly writes songs about fucking. So you can’t fault Taylor for that.
Then it started to happen. Snippets of Taylor would sneak into my conversations and, more importantly, into my thoughts. I was thinking while using her words. Her songs became my ideas. Wow, she’s good. Wow.
And I listened and listened and listened. Even before I listened to Folklore as much as The White Album, Taylor was there. I need less familiarity to feel it. She creams Cream and Zep. She’s not Miles, Stravinsky, or Zappa, but that’s a different category—she’s writing pop, and she’s writing it well. Really well—Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen well.
That’s more than enough to make her a hero for 2023. This year has been full of assholes—I’m surely not going to pick a politician as a hero. Taylor is brilliant, wonderful, hardworking and as far as I know is doing nothing to continue wars and kill people and it doesn’t seem she wants to be a dictator and destroy our democracy. Those are all pluses for me.
Is she writing Bob Dylan, Shakespeare well? Ask me again in 50 years, and I’ll give you an opinion. For now it was so nice to listen to real pop music and be able to have it become part of me, even this many years after I fell in love to “Maggie May”.
“In my defense, I have none ...” I’ve listened to Ms Swift enough now that this brilliant line from “The 1” seems to sum up so many things in my personal life. It might be better even than, “All you did was wreck my bed and in the morning kick me in the head.”
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