Kauai, Hawaii (The Daily Whatever Press)—Todd Rundgren, 78, certified musical genius, Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, and the man who wrote “I Saw the Light,” looked upon the most successful touring artist in human history and saw… her hair. Fuck that. Fuck it from the karaoke stage to the nosebleeds, and fuck it twice for dragging Pearl Jam into it.
I love Todd. I’ve belted “I Saw the Light” into a sticky bar microphone more times than my liver would like me to admit, and I’ll do it again.
It’s a perfect song — three minutes of bright-yet-contemplative pop built so well that even an amateur holding a drink can’t break it. I’ve loved Todd Rundgren for most of my life. He’s a genuine genius, a songwriter and producer whose fingerprints are all over the records GenX grew up on.
So it pains me to report that Todd has become the old man standing on the lawn and shaking his fist at the sky.
What Todd said
In a recent interview with Vulture, Rundgren was asked who he’d target if he made an album today designed to mock another artist, the way he’s said his production on Bat Out of Hell was a send-up of Bruce Springsteen. He didn’t have to think about it. Taylor Swift, of course. He floated the idea that she “ruined music,” called her “the apotheosis of mediocrity,” and added that she doesn’t do anything particularly great except grow hair.
Before I begin with my nuanced analysis, I need to interjection with a throaty, full-chested FUCK YOU, TODD — from the bottom of my feminist heart and the roots of my great hair.
A woman with more than a dozen Grammys and a spot in the Songwriters Hall of Fame got reduced to her hair. I can’t let that stand without leading with a raw, unadulterated eff bomb.
You can dislike her music. Plenty of people do, and that’s their right. But when a man reaches past the songs, the records, and the most successful tour in history to land on her appearance — he’s telling you what he thinks women are for.
I just asked my pal, the brilliant music essayist Stewart Mason whether he’d read this story. His response? “I had not, but Todd says a lotta shit for someone whose last good record came out in 1978.”
Now I’ll defend Something/Anything? until my last breath — but I laughed for a solid minute at that comment.
The video game theory
The hair comment is the headline. The part that actually made my jaw drop came next.
Rundgren said we’re living in the era of female artists, and he had an explanation for it: in the ’90s, boys stopped spending their money on records and started spending it on video games. The industry looked around, noticed all those teenage girls with allowances, and pivoted.
Put a feminist lens on that and it gets ugly fast. In Todd’s version of history, women didn’t earn the top of the charts. They inherited it, the way you get the last slice of pizza after everyone else has left the party. Female artists are what’s left over when the real audience leaves the room, and the girls buying their records are a fallback market rather than a force.
I’ve heard this logic before. When Sarah McLachlan wanted to bring Paula Cole on tour in the ’90s, promoters told her two women on the same bill wouldn’t sell, and they had a crude industry term for it: a pussy package. She built Lilith Fair instead, and it outgrossed every touring festival that year. The music business has never quite believed that women and girls are the audience. It keeps finding new theories for why they showed up anyway.
And “teenage girls ruined music” is about as fresh as a Sinatra bobby-soxer. Girls screamed for the Beatles, and serious men wrote serious columns about how that proved the Beatles were a fad.
Every generation, girls fall hard for something, a man explains why it doesn’t count, and 20 years later the same kind of man is citing it as canon.
Todd, meet the mirror
Rundgren gave the game away in the same interview. He called Swift a role model for a generation of young women — and now their daughters, too, since mothers and daughters go to her shows together. Then he talked proudly about his own audience spanning second- and third-generation fans, very old and very young.
So when parents hand Todd Rundgren down to their kids, it’s a legacy. When mothers hand Taylor Swift down to their daughters, it’s a symptom. The only variable I can find is who’s in the crowd.
He also praised Lady Gaga as a “real musician,” a classically trained pianist. I don’t doubt his admiration is sincere. But it’s the oldest move in the book: find the one woman who meets your criteria, hold her up as the exception, and use her to prove the rest of them are lacking.
I used to be Todd
Here’s my confession: I dismissed Taylor Swift for years.
I assumed she was the kind of commercial pop a self-respecting GenX indie kid was supposed to sneer at. I lived under an indie-rock; I’d built a whole identity around that sneer. What I didn’t notice was how much more harshly I applied it to women. Men who sold millions got to be craftsmen. Women who sold millions were products, and the girls who loved them were proof of how shallow the product was.
My daughters fixed that, and they didn’t do it with an argument. They just played her over and over, in the car and in the kitchen, until I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t listening. Somewhere in there — “All Too Well” was the one that finally got me — I realized she’s a brilliant songwriter, and that the voice in my head insisting otherwise was internalized misogyny wearing a flannel shirt. I’d been so wrong about her. I’ve been atoning for it ever since.
Now I karaoke “Betty,” too. It’s a story song from folklore, told from the point of view of a teenage boy trying to apologize to a girl he hurt, and it’s as carefully built as anything on a Todd Rundgren record. Anyone who thinks she can’t write should try singing it in front of a room and see how many people know every word.
The lesson’s still available
What I learned from my daughters wasn’t complicated. I had to notice that my assumption about Taylor Swift was an assumption, ask where it came from, and admit that a lot of it came from the same place that taught me to roll my eyes at anything teenage girls loved.
Todd Rundgren is 78, and he’s one of the most curious, restless musicians of the last half-century. He spent decades chasing new sounds and new technology before most people thought to. It’s a shame that curiosity stops at the edge of a stadium full of women and girls.
He doesn’t have to love her. He just has to question why he’s so sure. It took me years and two teenagers to get there, and I’ve never been happier to be wrong.
Next time I’m at karaoke, I’m singing “I Saw the Light.” Then I’m putting my name down for “Betty,” or perhaps “Shake It Off.”
Todd, you’re welcome to take the harmony.
Hi, I’m Dana. And I Write Out Loud.
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Times change and so do peoples taste. He doesn’t have to appreciate or listen to her music. Millions of others enjoy it. Being different does not make it bad! 🙄
These are two musicians with Pennsylvania roots. Todd's from my current home, Upper Darby, and Taylor's Christmas tree farm was in Wyomissing.
Although I remember with horror a holiday special where Taylor butchered "Silent Night," I'm rarely appalled by her music.