Patsy Cline on Taylor Swift and why she hasn't ruined music

Lord have mercy, if I hear one more grown man in a leather jacket complain about a hard-working gal running the show, I’m going to have to pull this tour bus over. Bless his heart, but Todd Rundgren is up in arms, telling anyone who’ll listen that young Taylor Swift is the 'apotheosis of mediocrity' and has gone and ruined the music business. Honey, please. As someone who had to fight tooth and nail just to get a decent royalty check in a room full of suits, I say let the girl have her flowers.

Taylor is out there breaking records at the VMAs, hauling home thirty-three of those shiny little space-man trophies and dropping her gothic new single, 'Patient Zero.' Some folks are calling her new music video downright chilling, and others are dissecting every single lyric like it’s a letter from the CDC. But let’s look at the bigger picture here. This isn't about artistic genius, and it surely isn't about mediocrity. It’s about an industry that gets so terrified when a woman holds the reigns that they have to take her down a notch out of sheer panic.

If we want to fix this silly, endless bickering between the old guard and the new royalty, we need to get back to what matters. Music isn't a competition to see who can collect the most silver statuettes, nor is it a corporate boardroom strategy to squeeze out the boys. It’s about singing from your heels and making a stranger cry in their beer. My advice to Taylor is to keep writing those heart-wrenching stories, but maybe leave the cinema cameras behind for a night, pull up an acoustic guitar, and sing a simple, three-chord tear-jerker that’ll make even the crabbiness of Todd Rundgren melt away. And to the fellas crying foul: stop staring at the screen, pick up a fiddle, and learn how to write a melody that can compete with a woman’s grit.