Originally published at: Damon Albarn apologizes to Taylor Swift after saying she doesn't write her own songs | Boing Boing
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Yer Man Allbran doesn’t write his songs though. He has stacks of collaborators. Famous ones.
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I don’t go out of my way to listen to Taylor Swift, but that woman can turn a phrase like few others. She is a very gifted writer.
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It’s different when women do it… our feeble little brains can’t possibly do something as complex as write a song, so it must be the men doing all the real work… /s
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Really weird that he would pick someone particularly known for writing very personal songs to go after.
Misogyny is one hell of a drug
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Swift’s father is a VERY rich banker, and he purchased a record company, who conveniently signed Taylor. It’s not like she was “discovered” by a record company. So, I’m pretty sure she has enough money to collaborate with writers who help her out. For example, Shake It Off was written by Taylor and Max Martin.
Does mean that Albarn, who very much collaborates with, you know, the people in his bands, isn’t being a misogynistic dick when he says dumb shit like this.
I’m really sick of the whole “women making music is just pop crap” mindset. Get over yourself, folks, it’s all pop culture. 
Just because it appeals to teen girls, doesn’t mean it’s crap.
Also…
So… yeah. I’m sure that Damon made it solely on his own merits, and his father’s connections had nothing to do with his success, unlike that poser Taylor… 
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Jake…is…is that you? 
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Check for the scarf!
I think I read Bjork in The Wire, where she talked about her process (taking the stems that had been recorded and deconstructing everything at home on Pro Tools and painstakingly reassembling everything) and how her male collaborators were described as “the producer”*. She did say (and I’m not sure it was that interview but maybe another) that she resisted being photographed with studio equipment for years.
Unrelated but I was just looking at a video of a young woman producer earlier on showing her process for a track. The way you do.
I don’t think young women any more will lack for role models if they want to produce. Let alone write.
*she did hire lots of pretty well known producers as hired hands for specific purposes on her projects.
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No, but they’ll still be told that any men they collaborate with are the primary ones responsible, because music is still a deeply misogynistic field filled with condescending dude-bros who think you need a dick to create something worthwhile.
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I know nothing beyond 1) Taylor Swift has a lot of fans who love her music and 2) dudes sure seem to like to hate on Taylor Swift – but that sure seems to point at “she has talent”
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I’ve never understood the whole attitude of “it doesn’t appeal to me, so it must not be good music.”
And of course, this whole idea that for music to be “authentic” it needs to be written by the people who are performing it is a pretty new concept in the scheme of things (I’d say it’s pretty much post-Dylan on when that shift happened)… the division of labor in the music industry used to be way different, with songwriter being a different role than performer, generally speaking (and it remains so, in some cases, especially with genres like J-Pop and K-Pop or the like). I mean, is something like Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” LESS powerful because we know she’s not the songwriter?
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But she was! Not the words but it’s her setting.
ETA
Teh wikis says I am wrong.
" Meeropol set his lyrics to music with his wife and the singer Laura Duncan" guess, go on, just guess who doesn’t seem to be credited?
and where I got the factoid
In her 1956 autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues , Holiday suggested that she, together with Meeropol, her accompanist Sonny White, and arranger Danny Mendelsohn, set the poem to music. The writers David Margolick and Hilton Als dismissed that claim in their work Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song , writing that hers was “an account that may set a record for most misinformation per column inch”. When challenged, Holiday—whose autobiography had been ghostwritten by William Dufty—claimed, “I ain’t never read that book.”[19]
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I know… I read her book years ago. But again, no one would suggest that it’s not HER song, primarily due to her interpretation of that song.
And she did indeed write songs, too… but the division of labor in the music industry during that era that it was common for singers of pop, jazz, or the like to be interpreters of other’s songs more than to be song writers themselves. No one is going around accusing Holiday or Sinatra of being “fake” or less talented for the role they played in the industry.
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Unless the context was Albarn saying something to the effect of “other people say she doesn’t write her own songs,” then it wasn’t context collapse, it was defamation (in the casual sense; I have no idea if it meets the legal standard of defamation). He should just own the fact that he ignorantly shot his mouth off instead of nopologizing.
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where’s that picture you used as an avatar about “my woman brain”?
seems appropriate here.
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Nobody is claiming she couldn’t afford to hire songwriters if she wanted to.
What she is saying is that it’s insulting and wrong to declare she doesn’t write her own songs because that is a factually untrue statement.
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