Taylor Swift's at an interesting inflection point in her career. She's won critical acclaim and a lot of awards, and made an enormous amount of money by giving articulate voice to the rather universal experience of teenage girls discovering love, attraction, and sex for the first time. But she's also old enough, rich, and experienced enough that some of the music she's making is starting to sound less like wise perspective and less like immature griping and tunnel vision.
First, there's the simple fact that "Dear John" is widely believed to be about her relationship with John Mayer (and her possible first sexual experience being with him). If that's true, and Swift has frequently said her songs are based in real-life experiences, it's about as petty as tearing your ex a new one on C-SPAN. You are not some powerless chick who needs to humiliate someone to get revenge. You're a mega-star. And something like this looks pretty pathetic to an older guy, or to anyone else who has been through the experience of a thwarted love. We may fantasize about doing what Carrie Underwood did to her cheatin' man's car, but a woman who commits some kind of public destructive act against a guy who did her wrong doesn't actually win our approbation, nor should it:
Second, it's just a bad song. The song's theoretically about taking responsibility and reassessing her mistakes, but in the chorus, Swift puts it all off on the guy, and in a surprisingly poorly-written set of lines. "I see it all now that you're gone / Don't you think I was too young to be messed with / The girl in the dress cried the whole way home / I should have known." Seriously, "the girl in the dress"? That is clearly phrased that way to provide the rhyme with "messed with" and the right scansion between the false rhymes of "home" and "known." It's transparently sloppy lyrics writing.
And perhaps someone who keeps a list of traitors and is blindly optimistic about a dude with a terrible Hollywood bachelor reputation and thinks of guys' immature sexual behavior as "dark, twisted games" is too young to be dating older guys. But Swift has a lot of money. She lives on her own. She'll be 21 next month. She's had a number of relationships. At some point, she's going to be at a point on the learning curve when this kind of public self-pity isn't winning or universal, it's just annoying.
