Dave Grohl needs to calm down. On stage in London last weekend, the lead singer with veteran heavy rock band Foo Fighters took a swipe at Taylor Swift’s juggernaut-like Eras tour when describing his group’s shows as “the errors tour”. He and his bandmates occasionally blundered, he continued, “because we actually play live”.
Grohl added an exaggerated “whaaat?” – indicating that he was fully aware his remarks, at the London Arena on Saturday, would immediately ping around the internet and send social media on fire. Swift, for her part, appeared to reference the comments at Wembley the following evening, telling her audience that her band was “gonna be playing live for you for three-and-half hours tonight”.
The Foo Fighters leader isn’t the first rock star of a certain age to get his plectrum in a twist over Swift and her right to be considered an authentic artist. Two years ago, Damon Albarn of Blur and Gorillaz, speaking to the LA Times, claimed that Swift “doesn’t write her own songs”. When the interviewer pointed out that she co-wrote her material, Albarn’s reply was: “That doesn’t count.”
Snobbishness towards pop goes back decades. Music journalists loathed Abba, for instance. “Shrill voices without regard to emotion or expression,” went a Rolling Stone review of their first Greatest Hits collection. Critics also had great fun dismissing peak Madonna – another Rolling Stone journalist decried her 1983 debut album for relying on a “girlish hiccup that the singer uses over and over until it’s irritating as hell”.
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It wasn’t just the media. “Madonna reinforces everything absurd and offensive,” Morrissey, former singer with Manchester indie band The Smiths, said in 1997. He later lamented her “frightening career” and attacked the Brit awards for inviting her to perform.
Morrissey has had plenty of competition when it comes to skewering pop stars. Liam Gallagher of Oasis described singer Florence Welch – who duets with Swift on her new LP, The Tortured Poets Department – as sounding like “someone’s stood on her f**king foot”. Mark E Smith, the late frontman of cult alternative group The Fall, said Ed Sheeran was “a duff singer-songwriter from the 70s you find in charity shop”.
Nor was Smith on board with the critical rehabilitation of Kate Bush. “It’s like all these radio DJs have been raiding their mam and dad’s record collections and decided that Kate Bush is cool again. But I’m not having it.”
Smith made those comments in 2014. In the decade since, perceptions have shifted considerably. Apple Music’s recent countdown of the 100 best albums of all time contained lots of pop – from Michael Jackson’s Thriller to Billie Eilish’s When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? and – yes – Swift’s recent re-recording of her record 1989. The war had been won, pop accepted as an art form every bit as valid as rock.
That’s why it’s disappointing to hear figures such as Grohl and Albarn dismissing Swift for “not playing live” or for having the nerve to write with other artists. (Isn’t that what Albarn has done with Blur and Gorillaz?)
Their comments are part of an unpleasant tradition in music known as “rockism” – the idea that rock musicians are the carriers of a sacred flame and that pop, by comparison, is frothy and ephemeral and not worth taking seriously. A 2004 New York Times essay defined rockism as “idolising the authentic old legend or underground hero while mocking the latest pop star ... loving the live show and hating the music video ... extolling the growling performer while hating the lip-syncher”.
Such prejudices seem absurd when you look at the career of someone like Swift in its totality. Much like Bruce Springsteen, her albums take the listener on an ever-expanding journey. Springsteen went from The River and Nebraska to Born in the USA and Letter to You. Swifties, meanwhile, have accompanied the singer from Fearless and Speak Now – glossy country records released back when she was often treated with suspicion by the Nashville establishment – to Midnights and The Tortured Poets Department.
In certain respects, however, pop has still to fully receive its dues. While it cleans up at the Grammys and the Brits, the genre fares less well at more rarefied award ceremonies. Of the UK’s Mercury Music Prize winners, only London musician Arlo Parks could be considered a pop artist, for instance. By contrast and to its credit, Ireland’s Choice Music Prize has been ahead of the curve by giving the award for best Irish LP of the year to Meath-raised country-pop artist Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, aka CMAT, in 2022.
More broadly, however, the cult of rockism has been in retreat for the last few decades – largely because there are so few rock stars left. All of the greats are shuffling towards retirement – even “younger” frontmen such as Brandon Flowers of The Killers and Coldplay’s Chris Martin are in their 40s, their creative prime arguably behind them.
Meanwhile, pop stars are all-conquering. In 2023, Harry Styles created history by becoming just the third pop singer – after Madonna and Robbie Williams – to top the bill at Slane. And now pop is storming stadiums – prompting the question of whether stadium rock is still a thing when the only people who can fill these venues are pop artists.
The degree to which rock can stage a comeback remains to be seen. But Grohl and Albarn’s remarks make it clear that guitar-heads of a particular generation have yet to reconcile themselves to the new reality – that pop rules and rock is second-hand news.
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