What are we really asking from music?

If your favorite artist looked like your math teacher, would you still care about their music? Yeah, I didn’t think so. And look, I’m not here to debate this because the moment someone brings it up, fans get so defensive they’d think people insulted their entire family. So I’ll just say it once and move on. Some songs can fill a stadium and still fall apart the second you take the production away. And some songs can sit in a vacant room with nothing around them and still wreck you completely. That difference is everything. That difference is actually the whole point.

And honestly, seven-year-old me also didn’t know the difference and couldn’t care about the music either. She cared about the face, the choreo, the backup dancers, the whole production, and the access to make friends. So, when she got inspired to write, she wrote the safest version of everything. Stars, the moon, the kind of things that sound pretty because the songs with spine were so underrated that Rahat Fateh Ali Khan’s songs made me feel alienated from my friends’ circle. Despite the truth that those years are the most intense and sensitive I could ever be, even if I didn’t have the words yet. I didn’t know metaphors, storytelling, or structure but the feeling underneath? It’s bigger and more detailed than anything I’ll write as an adult.

In my teenage years, my life got heavy, and writing about how a table sucks wasn’t helping. So I stopped writing at all because I wanted to pour things out, but my diary wasn’t being that friend to me and when I tried, my mom caught and tore the whole notebook away. And I felt guilty writing things without filtering them.

I turned twenty, COVID made me discover Folklore, and I never looked back.

Cardigan was the song. The lyric “And when I felt like I was an old cardigan under someone’s bed, You put me on and said I was your favorite” changed my whole world. I was always someone’s favorite when it was convenient, and all the lyrics opened the window for something more. That’s when I opened the diary again. That’s when I started writing from the state I was actually in and learned to do it more poetically over time.

That album didn’t fix the mess I was in. But every time I went back to it, it held something open. It always surprised me, and it made me think about everything and about me. The most terrifically new was that mainstream songs are more of an escape; then why is she writing these? So I listened to every song of hers; it never made me get out of any feeling — happy, free, confused, or lonely — but she made me face that moment gracefully. And it changed me as a person too.

But now when I surf the internet and watch fan videos of every other artist, listening to what they liked about their favourite singers, it made me laugh a little, but more than that it made me sad. It made me question: what could be the ultimate test of a song? What are we really asking from music?

While searching for that, I stumbled upon a lot of things, but the most grounding condition was: if a song doesn’t work acoustically, it’s not a song; it’s a production. It immediately filtered all the songwriters in my head and left me with very few: Taylor Swift, Halsey, Adele, Lana Del Rey, Gracie Abrams, Olivia Rodrigo, and Sombr.

You are free to decide for yourself according to your own playlist, but only if you can do it honestly. The task is to filter down to the songs that let you sit with one instrument, same lyrics, and one voice. Just the bones of the song and a person with no face. If it still holds the story, if it still makes you feel and think something, then it is a real song. If it doesn’t — what you have is not a song. And any packaging sold in the name of a song is a scandal.

This isn’t a case against production. Electronic music, orchestral scores, and pop production have their own genius and format. The difference is intention. In great production, the sound is the meaning. Every choice is deliberate; every texture has a purpose. In soulless pop, they sell you a story to sell you a song because the song never had one. And make the production: Distraction.

But some artists build a whole marketing universe around a song: glamorous music video, the costume, the aesthetic, the lore so you feel something about it. Strip all of it away and sometimes there was never a song…just a brand.

Because the music industry got very good at making us forget that test exists. We got so used to songs that needed the drop, needed the visual, needed the choreography to complete them, and we stopped asking whether the song itself was built on anything solid.

And streaming made it worse. Music is one tap away now, always. New drops every Friday, infinite playlists, algorithm-fed queues — we are consuming more than ever and reaching for quality less than ever. If we listen to a song a thousand times and still don’t get bored, we mistake that for the song being good. But that’s not what that is; that’s just how loops work. Every song on loop isn’t good music. Good distraction, maybe. Not good music.

It’s like concluding that drugs are good because a drug addict likes them. Tolerance isn’t taste. This habit of wanting something new every week has terribly replaced the habit of asking whether what we already have is actually worth anything.

But I have never felt that drop in quality with Taylor. She always sets the bar higher for her listeners and then serves higher. She, being the typical case where you cannot separate the art from the artist, tells her commitment to deliver something fruitful and make her music alive. She has constantly worked on her writing and vocals so much that when Swifties see her, we see a real person with mess who keeps growing, just like her craft.

And if she didn’t have real creative talent, she wouldn’t be able to turn her music videos into an extension of her writing.

There has to be a reason why most of her songs are left with poetry even if you don’t listen to the music and why Swifties have a song for every situation. Being so specific and still weaving the masses into each song is an art. It can’t be faked — not even by artists who have a team of ten people writing and producing hits for them.

From the very first listen, one thing her songs made me understand was that music is grounded by its lyrics and holds the ability to help us grow. And the more I got into her music, the more I got into myself, and I was able to write more than 100 poems. I am still learning the art of storytelling, but if it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t have had a place for my poems.

Moreover, I think that’s inseparable from who she is as an artist because she lifts other people consistently, visibly, without making it about herself. Not in the performative “support your fellow women” way, but in the specific, genuine way of someone who actually listens to their music. Award shows, interviews, events where she gets the spotlight — she finds a way to bring someone else into it. From Lana Del Rey to Stevie Nicks, and The Chicks…she credits her influences and her inspirations. She doesn’t hoard her light as if sharing it might make hers smaller.

It takes more than it looks, especially at the level she operates at.

Also, it connects to the same thing that makes the songwriting real. Someone who is genuinely letting art have its true essence and living by it, not just making it look aesthetic and perfect to boost her sales. Generosity and craft do come from the same source. They are both forms of paying attention to something outside yourself.

But what makes people follow an artist just for validation, where the face card matters more than the music, and loving someone becomes about defending them rather than understanding them?

The kind of fandom that turns an artist into a fortress. Where loving something becomes a full-time defense strategy; every conversation about music is actually a competition, another debate to win.

Taylor is one of the songwriters in the older, more demanding sense of that word. She was one before she was famous, and she has stayed one even as the productions got bigger and the budgets got larger. That is actually a choice. It would be easy, at her level, to let the process drift the other way — to hand over the interior work to a team and show up to polish the surface. She has always focused on her music rather than introducing a new product line like others to keep her face valid, make her career bigger, and make more money. And I think her audience feels that in each piece of her song, the feeling of being handed something that was made by a person and not assembled by a committee.

I’d rather be changed by music than defended by it. And she is just one of the examples I could quote but there are many other artists too who are best at their jobs and may not have the same spotlight. But show can run without spotlight and audience too, but only for the artist focused on their art…not cameras.

I’d rather write one honest thing than win a hundred comparisons online.

That’s what Folklore taught me.

And if that sounds like fangirling, it is. Fangirling over her music and writing. I can do it without obsessing over her face, mistaking her music video aesthetic for good music, or caring about what jeans she wears.

Every Song on Loop Isn’t Good Music was originally published in ILLUMINATION on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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Every Song on Loop Isn’t Good Music