I HATE TAYLOR Swift. I hate her for how bad she was on SNL, and for the fact that she’s dating #4 on my Freebie Celebrity Fucklist, and because of, you know, that hair. But mostly I hate her because her songs are totally shit, in the sense that they are all kitsch, literally pre-digested. Listening to a Taylor Swift song is like doing lunch, baby-penguin-style: every bite of krill hawked, already chewed, into your waiting mouth. There’s nothing to unpack in her work, no analysis to be done, no production of thought; every square inch of Swift’s oeuvre is nothing but trope chewed over so many times it is, by definition, pabulum.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not some Enid-from-Ghost World cunt who can’t enjoy anything other people like. I watch a pathetic amount of television, and I read gossip magazines like everyone else, and I will freely—not even drunk!—sing along to every single word of many tracks from High School Musicals 1, 2, and 3.

But I hate Taylor Swift’s music — and I really hate Taylor Swift’s video — because none of them tell stories.

I know, you thought they were all fairy tales! Well… nope. That would require character, or plot, or narrative movement. The worlds Swift creates lack all those elements; they are entirely personal fantasies, in which she is the only speaker, the scriptor not only of her own lines but of everyone else’s. This is demonstrated most dramatically by Swift’s favorite lyrical device—placing the final chorus of a song in the voice of the lover to whom she’s been singing all along, thus ensuring that no one but Swift gets to have words all to themselves.

Several of her videos share the same flash-forward-fantasy framework, in which we’re treated to the following progression: Swift sees Boy, Swift imagines life with Boy (including, now that she’s “matured” as an “artist,” marriage and kids); finally, Swift snaps back to reality, where she approaches Boy, dewy-eyed and as yet chaste. Nothing actually happens; everything is narrated from a timeless perspective in which the real Swift either lolls on a bed of flowers or twirls in a well-lit wood. Swift as figured by her music videos is a girl who is totally without agency; rather than chase after the one she want, she will envision their perfect ending and wait for the narrative inevitability of her self-contained daydream to bring them together. This psychological retreat gets imposed, in turn, on her listeners: Swift’s songs encourage you not to feel but rather to be force-fed feeling, to accept into your veins an injection of pure emotional gratification.

Then there’s how she looks. I hate to talk about this. But SRSLY. The girl is attractive in exactly the way she should be to do what she’s trying to do, a way that satisfies every culturally received notion of youthful beauty while still seeming, somehow, approachable, unthreatening, easy to take. She is blonde, and thin, and her hair looks like the yellow crayon spirals you drew coming out of a mermaid’s head when you were five. She’s a Disney princess in a way Disney princesses haven’t looked since political correctness happened, and there are still lots of white girls with hot rollers and tutus who simply must grow up to look like that or they’ll just, like, die. All of this only serves to underscore her role as the girl-next-door-cum-prom-queen par excellence, despite her lyrics’ insistance that she’s an outcast who “wears t-shirts” and jealously watches cheerleaders “from the bleachers.” How can a girl who looks like that ever be taken seriously as an antihero?

But Swift’s music doesn’t just deliver a double-shot of undiluted pop satisfaction. There’s also Kundera’s second tear—the pleasure you get from knowing that others will have the exact same reaction to her, that the clinical precision of her emotional manipulation is so effective it can’t help but evoke in you the same feelings it evokes in everyone else. I defy even the most virulent strain of angsty teenage nobody-gets-me-ness to resist the camaraderie formed by a tearful Swift sing-along. Listening to her songs gives you a joy that transcends her emotional bludgeoning and goes a long way toward fellow-feeling. There’s something comforting about the knowledge that everyone you know, everywhere they are, would be hit over the head in the exact same way you are by this curlicued caricature. She has accomplished her goal of feeding female youth back to themselves so thoroughly as to make her public persona essentially selfless, a cipher, a Platonic form of the Perfect American Girl, Subsection: Happy and In Love. It can feel incredibly unifying—almost makes you wanna, you know, march somewhere.

Of course, in another sense, all art is meant to do something like this, to cause a reaction, if not one as immediately and as unmeditative as the one Swift’s does. Could this all be just a matter of degrees? Is it really so important to take the long way around, wearing lumpy sweaters in dull light, watching mumblecore movies and thinking our way to elation? Sometimes, surely, it seems much better just to relax, and lean into impotent fantasy, and allow ourselves to be thin and golden-haired, carried off in a ballgown sewn from stars. After all, it’s so easy; all the work’s been done for us by Swift, the angel of instant emotional gratification, the bow-mouthed nurse with a tray of the opiates our frayed modern nerves so urgently crave. And isn’t that okay?

Um, no. I think it’s important to force yourself into the world, and, in the end, her reneging on that responsibility is what makes me give such a shit about how much Taylor Swift sucks (even when I couldn’t care less about similar critiques that could be levied at, say, ALL OTHER FORMS OF POPULAR CULTURE EVER). What bothers me most about Swift’s work is how perfect it is–and in its icy perfection–how terrifyingly mindless. Plenty of other things that are bad make me smile, while still at some point stimulating a prickle of irritation at some cheesy chord change or an amused snort at a flat line of dialogue. But Swift doesn’t itch, or bother, or in fact cause in me any negative reaction at all. She pushes all the buttons, and hits all the notes so well (if often just a bit on the flat side) that I can’t ever escape her three-minute dream worlds, or get my internal critical engines to turn over and start. She’s so good at this glittering thing that it beggars my ability to evaluate, to analyze, to apply the mind.

And once that happens, I’m over the edge into an abyss of animal numbness, a vacuum in which stimulus-response-repeat is the only valid mechanism of human action. By the end of every one of Swift’s songs—in fact, by the end of writing this essay—I feel just a little too tired to think about any of it anymore. And that thoughtlessness, is, most of all, why I motherfucking hate Taylor Swift.