Dude, Michael, this Taylor Swift thing,

Damon Albarn basically accused you

of being a clickbait journalist on Twitter.

Would you make of that?

I mean, that's fine.

Popstar is going to pop star.

Susie, did you think it was going to be this crazy?

I think that anyone who knows Swifties,

aka Taylor Swift fans,

they knew what was coming.

It was a Taylor Swift diss heard around the world.

She doesn't write her own songs.

That's what Damon Albarn, the lead singer for the British band's Blur and Gorillas, said to my

colleague, pop music critic Michael Wood.

The drama between Taylor and Damon got real, but it also hit on something really interesting.

Songwriting and who gets to credit? It's a thing. Now, more than ever.

I'm Gustavo Arellano.

You're listening to The Times, Daily News from the LA Times.

It's Friday, January 28, 2022.

I'm not a big Taylor Swift, and I know who she is.

And she's cool, but I'm not a fan. And I had to look up who Damon Albarn is, but this beef between them is not just pop fluff. There's real industry-wide and cultural implications for all of us, and especially the people who make the music that you love. And here to talk about all of this are two of my LA Times colleagues, music writers Michael Wood and Susie Explicito. Michael, Susie, welcome to The Times. Thanks, Gustavo. Thanks for having us here. So, Michael, let's rewind to earlier this week. Monday morning, you just published this interview with Damon Albarn. What happened next? So Damon Albarn, you know, frontman of the great 90s Britpop band Blur and Gorillas, which people might know. I had a chat with him last week at his hotel because he was going to play a show at Disney Hall. The show that he was going to do at Disney Hall was just him on a solo piano. And so we were talking about like, what is, how do you sort of rearrange your work when you perform like that? And he was like, well, it's kind of an interesting, it's a day of reckoning, he used the phrase, and sort of said that it shows you which of your songs were kind of relying on production or cool guitar sounds or whatever. And which of them had like, you know, the bones of a good song, like a good chord progression, good lyrics, good melody, yada, yada.

And then he was like, he sort of said this comment, he was like, you know, I don't think a lot of modern music could like withstand that day of reckoning. And I was like, oh, that's interesting to me. I don't, that's what you think. And he was like, well, yeah, name me someone whose work could. The first person that came to mine was is Taylor Swift.

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