Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia - Taylor’s Version of Country, Part 2
Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia
Slate Podcasts
4.8 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 30 April 2021
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In Part 2 of this episode of Hit Parade, Chris Molanphy continues his analysis of Taylor: the country years, dissecting how she gradually, step by step, became the new queen of pop one irresistible song at a time. She went from interviewing bigger stars on MTV’s red carpet one year, to being the talk of the Video Music Awards the next—even before Kanye took that microphone away from her. He told Taylor he would let her finish, but the game was already over. Swift had the most played song in the USA.
Podcast production by Asha Saluja, with help from Rosemary Belson.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening ad-free on Amazon Music. |
| 0:07.0 | Welcome back to Hit Parade, a podcast of pop chart history from Slate magazine, about the hits from |
| 0:14.3 | coast to coast. |
| 0:15.6 | I'm Chris Malanfi, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number One series? On our last episode, |
| 0:24.4 | we talked about Taylor Swift's country years, which are now being revisited in her 2021 |
| 0:30.8 | re-recording of her 2008 album, Fearless. Long before Swift made a deliberate move toward pop music, she was bringing |
| 0:40.4 | young fans to her country music and appearing in youthful mainstream spaces like the MTV Video |
| 0:48.3 | Music Awards. In 2009, Swift arrived at the VMAs with a song and video, You Belong With Me, that was about |
| 0:57.0 | to be the most played U.S. radio hit and the winner of a Moonman trophy. |
| 1:03.0 | But that win is where the trouble started. |
| 1:07.8 | If the song You Belong With Me was Spunky, its video was more so, a fully realized depiction of its high school story, with Taylor playing both the mousy nerd pining for her handsome male friend and the bitchy brunette Queen Bee, whom he's currently dating. |
| 1:29.9 | It was nominated for Best Female Video at the 2009 VMAs, and Swift's competition was heavy. |
| 1:38.9 | Clips by Kelly Clarkson, Lady Gaga, Katie Perry, Pink, and, of course, famously, Beyonce. |
| 1:47.3 | And Taylor won. |
| 1:48.9 | And that's when the incident, the one that immortalized the phrase, |
| 1:54.3 | Amma Let You Finish, happened. |
| 1:56.9 | Now, most articles and video recaps that recount the Kanye West Taylor Swift run-in at the 2009 VMAs |
| 2:06.0 | zoom in on the moment that West takes the stage and takes the microphone away from Swift. |
| 2:13.5 | I want to play Taylor's whole speech, well, what there was of it, before Kanye showed up, |
| 2:20.5 | because it captures what the stakes were for Swift and for country music that night. |
| 2:26.9 | The best female video goes to Taylor Swift. |
| 2:37.0 | Thank you so much. Thank you so much. I was dreamed about what it would be like to maybe win one of these someday, |
... |
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