Now, I love me some Toby Keith. I have even watched Beer for My Horses with my college roommates. But in both sound and lyrics, his music is solid country. Let's take "God Love Her," for example. Big, crunchy guitar riffs on the chorus. Narrative plot about a preacher's daughter who hooks up with a motorcycle dude, and ends up getting him right with the Lord. Swampy pronunciation of "Daddy." It's a great song, but firmly situated within its genre, just like Keith's best songs, whether it's the class-based drink preferences of "Whiskey Girl," the shots with Willie Nelson in "Beer for My Horses," or the utterly sublime "Should Have Been a Cowboy." And I can understand why if the sound of country isn't something that necessarily appeals to you that the lyrics wouldn't rope you in any further.
Taylor Swift on the other hand, often has music that sounds much more explicitly countryfied than Toby Keith does. The sheer amount of twang in the music for "You Belong With Me" is almost overwhelming. But the lyrics are entirely situated within the teen-movie-evil-cheerleader-v.-hot-girl-hidden-behind-her-glasses genre. There's even this weird little lyrical intervention: "I'm in my room / I'm listening to the kind of music she doesn't like," which I sort of assume doesn't involve country, since it's meant to be an edgy pronouncement. It's an odd moment, but characteristic of the distance between Swift's musical style and lyrical content. And that's what makes her so successful, I think. It's not that anyone really hates banjo music, or finds fiddle aesthetically distasteful, or anything. It's that songs like "She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy" are absurd. And within the context of rural America, maybe it's a semi-parodic absurdity, but outside of that, it just seems kind of goofy and unrelatable. Maybe what Taylor Swift and the new generation of girls with guitars are exporting isn't country in its purest and most undiluted form, but that's okay.