country gals tellin' it like it is

“Fifteen,” Taylor Swift- The music is about as gritty as a John Cougar Mellencamp car commercial. Esatz, sure; there’s no virtuoso soloists here. Excepting, perhaps, Taylor’s voice, which is fragile, limited; as girl-next-door faceless as any Dixie Chick or Bangle. And that is as it should be, the better to render her songs raw and still somehow emblematic, personal and still somehow universal, like pop songs are supposed to be. Jaded rocker machismo cannot abide Swift’s frilly gossamer lite country pop. But to fifteen year-old girls, like the two in this song, she’s a hero. And tougher than you think: “back then I swore I was going to marry him someday but I’ve realized some bigger dreams of mine.” I don’t want to make too big of deal of her story telling, as it’s not essential to what I think makes great pop, but in pop it’s rarely done better than this. From the git—“you take a deep breath/and you walk through the doors/it’s your very first day/say hi to your friends/and try to stay out of everybody's way”— she takes you there. High school, a ruthless popularity contest, full of shiny new hopes and muffled miseries. Endure, kids; endure.

“Only Prettier,” Miranda Lambert- This was closer to my Number One until I watched the videos, where in every version I checked Miranda is, confoundingly, restrained and serious. When this song is, in fact, a stridently big bodacious grinner that stomps and swings cheerfully. “Let’s shake hands and reach across those party lines,” challenges Lambert, “we’re a lot like you, only prettier”! The song is so damn winning I imagine it’d make curmudgeonly partisan columnist Paul Krugman reconsider bipartisanship. “I got a mouth like a sailor and yours is more like a Hallmark card,” she chides. The strutting crunch and sociable lap-steel guitar melody make you want to hug a redneck. Or at least imagine the possibility you could coexist happily with one for the duration of the song. Besides a couple other tugs at the heart her latest album is kind of hohum, though. Why is it the country music outsider alt-rockers love most always seems to turn out to be not as good as you might have hoped?