From confessional pop to scientist rock

Buckle up: We're touching on Taylor Swift, Cindy Lee, Beyoncé, and the Minutemen -- all with a touch of yard work -- before this one is done.

I didn’t set out to write about back-breaking yard work, a 40-year-old punk masterpiece, a shadowy indie star in the making and two outsized pop idols, but here we are. If you like these occasional missives, subscribe and share.

I spent the weekend shoveling mulch into a yard cart, wheeling it around the perimeter of our lawn,and spreading it in what is likely a vain attempt to repel weeds. I came away from it with a short-lived sense of accomplishment, an aching back, and a much shorter list of podcasts lined up on my phone.

After having nearly exhausted my ears with all manner of talking, I cued up some music. Curiosity and an afternoon with nothing but time to kill equaled an odd desire to listen to the new Taylor Swift album, The Tortured Poet's Department. Why not soundtrack my sweat-soaked plodding around the Kenyon estate with the synthetic beats of America's most glamorous star? This was my first time listening to Swift on purpose. Her music is like the air that we breathe, so it is impossible to avoid ambiently, but I had never sought it out. According to the reviews, which seem to be riding the wave of an inevitable backlash against her ubiquity, I didn't choose the best place to begin.

But begin I did, and I stuck with it for a surprising duration, listening to most of the original release (more on that in a moment). I didn't necessarily like it, but it didn't repel me. I can see the appeal, even if it doesn't work on me. After several songs of very well-crafted serviceable pop, I switched back to what I had been listening to earlier in the week: The new album by indie artist Cindy Lee. The juxtaposition was fascinating. Swift's album came after months of buildup and hype. She released various versions in an attempt to sell multiple copies to each consumer, then added another album's worth of music — dubbed The Anthology version — mere hours later to further juice sales. In short, it was difficult to ignore, a product meant to overwhelm the marketplace.

Lee, meanwhile, is the drag queen moniker of musician Patrick Fleagel, a former member of the indie rock band Women. For most of you, this is likely the first time you have read any of those names. Lee released the double album Diamond Jubilee a couple of weeks ago in one of the least-commercial ways possible, making it available only as a YouTube video with no track breaks or as a download from a Web 1.0-looking Geocities site. Of course, a good album that is somewhat difficult to find will become its own phenomenon, and a handful of early reviews, including a rave from Pitchfork, made it indie-ubiquitous in a scaled-down premonition of Swift's emergence. Everyone on indie-rock Twitter weighed in, and a short slate of live shows sold out instantly.

It's a beautiful, sprawling album that has enough variety and hooks to nearly justify its two-hour run time. Over 32 songs, Lee dabbles in indie-pop clatter, the buzzy energy of glam, a bit of retro girl group swoon, and much more. It's a cohesive, mature musical statement from an artist most of its listeners have never heard of previously. That will change thanks to those rave reviews and the mystique of its anti-commercial release. But it is an intensely accessible guitar-pop album that will have staying power, one that will surely rest near the top of many "best of 2024" lists come December.

All of that describes it from a musical perspective. Lyrics rarely are the first thing I latch onto. The music must hook me and keep me long enough that the lyrics -- no matter how up front or provocative they may be -- can reveal themselves over repeat listens. In this case, Lee's vocals, peeking out from behind an echoey, gauzy sheen that keeps the listener at a remove, only welcome such an embrace. 

It places the emphasis on Lee's inventive tunes. Swift, in contrast, puts her vocals squarely at the front. They are the point, as the productions from Jack Antonoff and Bryce Dessner are fairly rote and flat. They are designed to support — and never detract — from the star. These feel less like songs and more like constructions. It's mostly pleasant and inoffensive, passing by without once making me set down the shovel and marvel at a musical figure. The only time it caught my attention is when I wondered if I had accidentally skipped to one of Swift's earlier country albums when "But Daddy I Love Him" boot scooted its way through the misted synths. Instead, I was left to drift, occasionally making note when a stray vocal caught my ear. "Did she really just name drop Patti Smith?" and "Did she just drop an F-bomb?" might have been my only thoughts about the lyrics over the course of an hour. 

Despite the parallels and differences that make the Swift and Lee albums so interesting to place next to one another, it wasn't until a third double album came into the picture that things came into focus. After reading a short piece in the new Mojo magazine about the Minutemen — I don't know that I'll ever get over reading pieces presented as history that recount things I experienced the first time around — I cued up their majestic masterpiece from 1984, Double Nickels on the Dime as I completed the final cleanup from the Great Weekend of Mulch. Suddenly, here was a better analog to The Tortured Poet's Department.

Swift has long been known as someone who writes thinly veiled diary entries set to music. In this case, one of the main knocks against the album has been the wordiness of those tracks, the accusation that she is simply trying to cram too much into her songs.

Meanwhile, here's bassist Mike Watt commenting on Double Nickels: "Ulysses was a big influence on me; James Joyce writing about everything that happened in this one day made me think what a springboard it was, to be in a band and rap about stuff with your buddy and go and explore the world." The tortured novelists department, indeed.

Swift dates someone, has a breakup, and immediately puts pen to paper to pour out her soul. The frantic pace of her releases is matched only by the full to bursting nature of her life. Determining which drives the other is for someone who cares far more about this than I do.

But listen to the Minutemen, and you get the same overstuffed tales pulled directly from real life. Ray Farrell, one-time promotion manager for the Minutemen's label, SST, discusses the band's lyrics: "Their songs were like diary entries. They didn’t belabor anything – they wanted to get their message out there quickly, and move on."

Unlike Swift, who seems to couch jabs in an ambiguity that does nothing to cloak intentions, the Minutemen's D. Boon lets you know exactly who he is singing about. There is pointed commentary about Vietnam and U.S. foreign policy as it relates to Central America, but also heart-on-sleeve reminiscence, like this from "History Lesson - Part II":

Our band could be your life

Real names'd be proof

Me and Mike Watt played for years

Punk rock changed our lives

Swift's motivation for pumping her album up to a double mere hours after its release are unknown. One can't help but wonder if the hype around Beyoncé’s "country" album, Cowboy Carter, had something to do with it. It was also a double album, boasting 27 tracks. As the only thing that could compare in scope and hype to Swift's release, perhaps its existence was enough to drive Swift to push the number of tracks from the initial 16 to 31 by the time her album hit three weeks later.

This mirrors the influence of Hüsker Dü's Zen Arcade on the Minutemen's subsequent release. After learning their labelmate's new album would be a double, Watt and his bandmates got to work. "When they came to California to record in 1983, we barbecued for them on Cabrillo Beach and they told us about their new double concept album, Zen Arcade," Watt told Mojo. "We thought: 'We could do that too!' It was a dare, right?"

They had an album's worth of material ready to go, but they "decided to write a bunch more songs," Watt said, to push it to a double. In this case, that meant a tracklisting with more than 40 short songs. The longest song is 3 minutes (and it and a couple of songs were omitted from CD issues so everything would fit on one disc), and it is sometimes difficult to differentiate one song from another because of how quickly things move. As Farrell told Mojo, "Double Nickels is non-stop. It’s not about hooks or pop songs. If you’re not paying attention, it’s just this wash of energy. If you are paying attention, it has this dynamic that is very invigorating."

The same cannot be said of Swift, at least to these ears. There is a plasticine sameness to the songs, despite any variation in tempo or instrumentation. It's built for radio, for streaming a song at a time. I wouldn't call the Cindy Lee album "dynamic" or "invigorating" either, but it is certainly rewarding, the variety of sounds and captivating production keeping my attention throughout. While listening just now to a Swift track, my phone jumped to a song that startled me. Had I missed this one the first time around? The lack of gloss was immediately inviting. No, it had simply reverted back to the Cindy Lee album. 

I haven't waded into Beyoncé’s album yet, and maybe that will be a better comparison to Diamond Jubilee, a musically adventurous album touching on different genres and styles that stands more as a statement of artistic intent than as the latest journal set to music.

None of these four albums are truly alike, of course, despite shared qualities; no one would mistake one for another, and I would guess few people have all four in their "recently played" queue. I can't imagine spending much more time with the Swift, or more than a curiosity-driven spin through Beyoncé’s album. The Cindy Lee will earn more listens, and time will tell if it's a keeper. But 40 years on, the Minutemen still have something to say, their propulsive blasts of herky-jerk guitar, pulsing bass, frenetic rhythms and transparently heartfelt lyrics grabbing me as tightly the last time as the first. 

Did we accomplish anything here? Not much, though if you take a moment to listen to Cindy Lee or the Minutemen because of this, I'll consider it time well spent. I do know a few truths after all of this. Long after my yard reverts back to the clover-choked expanse that nature intended, Double Nickels will continue to blast from the speakers, D. Boon and Mike Watt playing guitar. Lee will likely have moved on to another persona, another sound, and I’ll be there to take it in. And Beyoncé and Taylor Swift will have sold a few more million records to the people who love them.