#yes that absolutely is true but i'd argue 'mad woman' is much more rooted in taylor swift's specific personal narrative than

[bybdolan]

AMY! https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/taylor-swift-the-bob-dylan-of-our-age-pmlg5m7hl

You are the third person to send me this link but I finally managed to dodge the paywall to the article in order to make a nuanced statement, and that statement is: Mhh.. idk?

If you have been around for a while you have probably been witness to me arguing why I tend to disagree with statements such as "Taylor Swift is the new Bob Dylan/Bruce Springsteen!" (Spoiler: It is because I personally find a lot of the impulses Bob and Bruce use to create art vastly different to the impulses Taylor uses - Taylor's art is tied to her life and her experiences in a way that many, though not all, of Bruce' and Bob's songs are not) and generally speaking I tend to find most of the comparisons sort of lame because they kind of revolve around the "both of these people are great songwriters who were the voice of a generation!", which is true but doesn't capture what makes these artists special. That said, I do think the article makes some interesting points in regards to how both Bob and Taylor came out of a scene that highly valued authenticity and were punished for breaching out of it, and I also agree that Taylor's influence on the future generations of songwriters likens her to Dylan, as does her tendency for self-mythologization (although her n Bob's public personas are radically different) (+ Bob is much more intertextual in general). I also think both are excellent in transporting you into the scene of a song and making you envision the setting and characters. However, I personally can't simply look past the vast difference in subject matter and style that these artists have. "All Too Well (10 Minute Version)" is a great song, as is "The Times They Are A-Changing", but they obviously deal with very different things. And sure, perhaps it is unfair to pidgeon-hole Bob Dylan as a protest singer (a comparison to "Tangled Up In Blue" for example would make much more sense), but it IS a significant part of his oeuvre and part of what made him "the voice of a generation". The same can be said for Taylor, who captures the anxiety of the social media generation incredibly well, but writing songs about brewing revolutions and the constant threat of nuclear annihilation is a lil different than writing songs about how tough it is to preserve your sense of self in times of Instagram & Co. Not that one is per se more deeper or worthwhile than the other, it's just different. (I do wonder why we never see the comparisons between Dylan and certain HipHop artists, who genuinely follow into Protest Song footsteps.)

And, to simply be biased for a second here: I consider Bob a better and more versatile writer than Taylor and because I specifically hold his more Protest Song-adjacent songs close to my heart for how well they manage to capture broad anxieties within society/young people in particular, the comparison will always slightly rub me the wrong way. But as I am not a music journalist writing for a major publication... That's okay.