Taylor Swift’s Go-To Producer Is a Controversial Figure. Here’s What the Backlash Is Really About.

The figures pile up comically high in practically every Taylor Swift article, and there’s an endless supply of Taylor Swift articles. You’ll hear about her Billboard chart records, her tour grossing records, her tour-movie grossing records, her social-media dominance, her music-business machinations, and how her love life is saving the NFL. Last week, she had the biggest sales week in her 17-year career, which is to say in pretty much anyone’s career. The latest entry in her aggressive business strategy slash Warholian postmodern exercise of rerecording her previous albums, 1989 (Taylor’s Version), tops the Billboard albums chart, while on the singles chart, she just became the first woman ever to replace herself at No. 1, with bonus track “Is It Over Now?” ousting her own “Cruel Summer,” which had crowned the Hot 100 for two weeks despite being a 4-year-old track from Lover. Last month, Bloomberg reported that the former teen star is now one of a tiny handful of musicians ever to become a billionaire. And next year she will be taking the “Eras” tour to the moon and wrapping the celestial orb in a gigantic friendship bracelet. Or so I assume.

So why is it, I ask you, that there is little sign of an anti–Taylor Swift backlash today? Wouldn’t there be one against anybody who attained such omnipresent, culture-crushing, money-vacuuming mainstream triumph?

Granted, there already has been one extensive backlash against Swift. It was in the mid-2010s, and touched on her romances, politics, race issues, and accusations of feigned victimhood. But it also involved people siding with Kanye West, which no longer seems like any kind of a good look. So Swift is partly shielded by that history. Then there are her own smartly calculated goodwill gestures, such as handing out $100,000 bonuses to her tour’s truck drivers, or breaking up with Matty Healy. Most of all, perhaps, given the intensity of online stan culture, nobody wants to deal with the harassment that could follow from airing their hostility toward Swift’s perky perfection.

How, then, are people to manage their natural human resentment of this rich, beautiful, inescapable, capitalist-pop-star giraffe woman? Even, dare I say it, Swifties themselves? Simple: Redirect it instead against her nerdy, bespectacled, Brooklyn hipster music-producer dude of choice, Jack Antonoff.

In case you haven’t been introduced, Antonoff first worked with Swift in 2013 and has been her primary co-writer and producer since roughly 2019. He’s played a similar role for other youngish female pop auteurs such as Lorde, Lana Del Rey, St. Vincent, Clairo, and Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine, as well as less obviously comparable artists like the 1975 (Healy’s band), Kevin Abstract (of the hip-hop “boy band” Brockhampton), country veterans the Chicks, and the Minions. In his spare time, Antonoff has his own much-less-heard band, called Bleachers, and way back when, he was also a member of the group Fun, who had that 2011–12 hit “We Are Young,” though he was mostly just a sideman in that trio and seems to dislike being reminded of it.

But back to the present, when Antonoff is Swift’s co-writer and co-producer on “Cruel Summer,” as well as nearly all of the “From the Vault” tracks on 1989 (Taylor’s Version) and most of last year’s Midnights, including its blockbuster single “Anti-Hero.” No wonder he told Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show last week that he’s “loving where the music business has gone.” After all, everything’s been coming up Jack.

Everything, that is, except for the waves of bilious anti-Antonoff vitriol that wash over the internet with each passing record-release cycle. The gist of it was summed up by culture journalist Jill Krajewski’s tweet after Midnights came out a year ago: “Jack Antonoff dulls the edges of every pop star he produces and must be stopped.” Music critic Nina Corcoran chimed in: “Please, artists, I’m begging you to hire anyone but Jack Antonoff to produce your album.” And New Zealand video producer Caleb Gamman went viral that same week with a clip in which he correctly identified each Midnights track as Antonoff or non-Antonoff within seconds, like a bizarro version of Name That Tune powered by pure loathing.

This past summer, Stanford doctoral student Mitch Therieau took the critique to more sweeping extremes, diagnosing Antonoff as a vector of commercial corruption and cultural decline in a widely read essay titled “Dream of Antonoffication: Pop Music’s Blandest Prophet.” But the antagonism is not a recent thing: In 2021 Pitchfork was already describing Antonoff as pop music’s “Polarizing Nice Guy,” while in 2019 a Vice writer declared bluntly, “Jack Antonoff Makes a Lot of Music and None of It Is Good.”

The past few weeks’ iteration of the hatefest featured some Swifties on socials blaming Antonoff for supposedly ruining 1989 (TV) tracks that he actually had no part in rerecording—aside from the “Vault” tracks, he worked only on the songs he originally produced in 2014, such as “Out of the Woods”; the rest were done with Christopher Rowe, who’s been Swift’s go-to knob twiddler on all of the “Taylor’s Versions.” More reasonably, other fans protested that the “Vault” songs here sounded more like outtakes from Midnights than songs in the original spirit of 1989, on which Max Martin and Shellback were the lead producers. Charges of repeating himself have been a staple of anti-Antonoff discourse since at least Lorde’s 2021 album Solar Power, when fans groused that “Stoned at the Nail Salon” sounded too much like Lana Del Rey (ignoring the possibility that the two artists might have been influenced by each other, rather than led astray by their producer). One popular meme, a picture of a shopper reaching into empty shelves, was captioned, “Jack Antonoff at the new ideas store.” Which is pretty funny, though you might stop to wonder why it’s not Lorde or Swift coming up short at the concept shop instead. In any case, Swifties have proceeded to growl that Antonoff better not touch the future rerelease of 2017’s Reputation, even though he was much more involved with the original sound of that record (a sound they presumably like) than he was with 1989.

Has Antonoff really sown all the wrath he reaps? Let’s examine some of the main allegations. First, broadly, does he in fact “dull the edges” of all of his clients’ music and submerge them in some kind of Antonoffian murk? Like most producers of any note throughout music history, he does have some stylistic trademarks, which is presumably part of what artists hire him for. (I keep wondering now if there were fans in the 1960s who thought George Martin was ruining the Beatles.) As Gamman and others have pointed out, Antonoff tends to use—too often, I agree—analog synthesizer pulses of eighth and sixteenth notes as propulsion, and his drum sounds tend to feel a bit canned. His arrangements can be too busy, cluttered with layers of samples and reverb. But not, it should be noted, in the vocal frequency range, which he’s adept at setting off to advantage, befitting his specialization in singer-songwriters. That said, his own Bleachers output suggests that melody is not his strong suit. If (and only if) his songwriting partner isn’t feeling inspired on that front, the results can get monotonous, often talk-singy or sing-shouty—or, in Swift’s case, gussied up with interval jumps that seem showy in the Broadway sense, rather than fluidly surprising, like the best pop.

These are attributes of many lesser Midnights cuts, as well as the “Vault” songs on 1989 (TV). Those tracks in particular (and some on the previous rerecorded albums too) seem like evidence that there was not actually much leftover finished material from the period for Swift to work with, contrary to the impression she tries to give fans. Aside from the Diane Warren co-write “Say Don’t Go,” most of these songs feel as if Swift found some fragments in her old notebooks, fleshed them out with new words in her current, less concise lyrical style (not to mention her more recent grown-up directness about things like sex and booze), then composed new music for them with Antonoff. This sleight of hand is part of a larger pattern: Swift seems driven to pad out her recent albums—and between fresh and recycled ones, there have been seven since the turn of the decade—with nearly enough bonus material to make up whole other albums. It’s partly to get fans to buy multiple versions, partly to game streaming algorithms and the charts, and also perhaps because unimaginable levels of adulation have her tempted to imagine that her every idea is a treasure worth sharing. This level of output makes redundancies inevitable. If Antonoff deserves blame for this, it’s mainly for not saying no.

Still, yes, Antonoff has stylistic quirks, and if they irritate you as intensely as they do Gamman, that’s your prerogative. But they do not make him the paragon of pop blandification. Antonoff has been alongside his collaborators at both their best and their worst, and in different musical modes. Sure, he made Solar Power with Lorde, a record that sounded grudging, as if the artist would rather be somewhere else altogether. But he also helped midwife Melodrama, on which his sharp synth angles and her modular song structures seemed to be in perfect, dynamic synchronicity. He’s helped facilitate some of Lana Del Rey’s more rote exercises, but also her greatest work, 2019’s Norman Fucking Rockwell, as well as the standout “A&W” on her latest album. He might have had a hand in St. Vincent’s letdown Daddy’s Home in 2021, but he also co-produced 2017’s mesmerizing Masseduction. And lest you conclude that this all indicates that Antonoff started strong but is flaming out, I think he did excellent work helping the young bedroom-pop artist Clairo reach new sophistication on 2021’s Sling, as well as on the 1975’s 2022 album Being Funny in a Foreign Language, seeming to rein in some of the band members’ past indulgences without selling out their point of view. And to return inevitably to Swift, Antonoff may be an element of what makes Midnights “mid,” but even though Aaron Dessner (of indie band the National) was the main sonic architect of the superb Folklore, Antonoff was Swift’s partner on many of its best songs, including “August” and “Mirrorball.”

It’s not only logically inconsistent to blame Antonoff for these artists’ flops while not crediting him for their tours de force, it’s blatantly sexist to ascribe core authorship to the man in the studio rather than the women whose names are on the record covers. Lorde herself has described that narrative as “insulting,” echoing objections Swift and other artists have raised for years. By all accounts, Antonoff is the furthest thing from the creepy and controlling Svengali producers of the past (and sometimes, lamentably, present), and it’s clearly a major factor in why these women want to work with him, nearly always as co-producers themselves. Note that his own right-hand person is engineer Laura Sisk, to whom he dedicated his Grammy for Producer of the Year in February; their partnership helps avert from the outset any boys’-club atmosphere in the studio.

If anything, one could speculate that at times the environment becomes too chummy, with the artist and their co-producer forming too much of a mutual appreciation society. That’s a particular risk in an age when albums are made mainly on digital audio workstations, with fewer human musicians visiting to offer external perspectives, and when songs are frequently based on improvisations in the studio rather than coming in close to fully written. (See the famous footage of Antonoff and Swift working on “Getaway Car.”) This is how it’s being done across the industry now, but it might have particular drawbacks in music based in the singer-songwriter tradition. If Antonoff and specific collaborators seem to get diminishing returns over time, maybe it’s to do with these questions of process.

There have also been changes in musical fashion, which artists and producers in pop may not blindly follow but usually do try to engage with, unless they’re content (as some should be) with falling out of the game. Since the era of 1989, pop has become much less brash and anthemic and much more insinuating and downbeat. The way there was led by hip-hop, R&B, and indie, and in pop-qua-pop maybe foremost by Billie Eilish. But you can hear Swift trying to adjust, to follow suit just enough but not too much. A lot of 1989 fans yearn for the return of Max Martin bangers, but Martin is off the radar in pop in general right now (aside from his continuing link with the Weeknd). Pop sounds are cyclical that way. Martin also went out of style in between his late-1990s period of bubblegum smashes with Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys and his turn-of-the-2010s run of empowerment anthems with Katy Perry, Pink, and others. Swift and Antonoff are navigating similar shifting waters. But if you examine last week’s Billboard Top 10, for example, “Cruel Summer” remains by far one of the bolder, more traditionally pop tunes on it, compared to the loop-based sidewinding of Drake, Gunna, or even Nashville’s Morgan Wallen.

All of which seems to confuse and perplex “Antonoffication” essayist Therieau, who treats Antonoff less as a musician than as a symptom of the generalized social and aesthetic malaise of digital-platform-era capitalism: “If there were a producer who fully belonged to this moment, he would need to be something like a non-brand brand, paradoxically recognizable for his ability to produce stylishly forgettable content.” Unlike Gamman, whose peeves over Antonoff’s drum samples and “digital tinkly stuff” may be persnickety but are at least specific, Therieau faults Antonoff for both his “minimalism” and his “maximalism,” claiming that his music is at once (or alternately?) dozy conformism and screaming manipulation, a line of reasoning that ends up swallowing its own tail.

Therieau is far from the first to propose that streaming listening habits and the playlist algorithms that shape them are luring pop in the direction of wallpapery background music. Researcher and critic Liz Pelly five years ago labeled it “streambait pop” or “Spotify-core.” I’m a bit wary, because I remember “Today’s pop is the same as Muzak” also sounding like an edgy insight 30 years ago. But if this is what’s happening, Antonoff, as I argued above, does not seem the most likely culprit. Let’s hear from another opponent of the pernicious effects of streaming—that would be Jack Antonoff. “I’ve heard people say things like: ‘We have the data, and if your song fades out, it won’t react well in the playlist,’ ” Antonoff told Jody Rosen of the New York Times Magazine in 2020. “Since the dawn of recorded music, the industry has marketed its product to the 10 percent of people who really care about and love music. Now, with streaming, the other 90 percent—the people who listen to music but don’t care about music—well, now the industry is marketing to them. I’m supremely focused on people who obsessively love and live and die by music. … No offense to everyone else, but those are my people.”

Therieau’s other definition of Antonoffication is much curiouser: “The process of the dispersion of the aesthetics of indie rock out from a distinct subcultural enclave and into a general ether that suffuses and unites the major genres of today’s Top 40 pop music. Which is to say, the complex process of cultural mediation through which all pop music today has become a little bit indie rock.” It’s fairly routine for the supposedly outsider sounds of one decade, like 2000s indie rock, to be absorbed into the musical mainstream of the next one. It can be unpleasant when what you felt was your special thing gets co-opted, but it’s difficult to prevent, it’s how commercial culture refreshes itself, and maybe it’s preferable to your thing simply dying out. (I stress, maybe.) Either way, amid a lot of loose verbiage about “free-floating tastefulness” and “mass high culture,” I find it hard to tell whether Therieau thinks pop has been degraded by this supposed infusion of indie or the other way around. I did get a fairly major clue when I heard him interviewed on the Pop Pantheon podcast and he started fantasizing about avant-garde indie guitarist-composer Jim O’Rourke, instead of Antonoff, producing Solar Power: “It could have been a cool, like, a Wilco or Loose Fur album, the bleeps and the bloops and kinda clouds of random noise, but instead Jack just kinda did the Jack thing, sitting in the corner as a vibe dispenser.”

I don’t think O’Rourke has produced anyone else’s records for about 15 years, but in any case, yes, if you’re inclined to wish pop sounded more like esoteric experimental music, you’re probably not going to be fond of the work of Jack Antonoff. Yet Therieau’s point about Antonoff coming out of indie rock is perhaps accidentally more interesting when you consider all the similar producers who share that background, such as Dessner, Dan Nigro (basically Olivia Rodrigo’s Jack Antonoff), Joel Little (who’s also worked with both Lorde and Swift), and Billie Eilish’s collaborator-brother Finneas. In part, they moved into production as indie rock became a less viable career path. But potentially they might bring along a less hierarchical, more cooperative perspective compared to the typical major-label studio jock. With female producers still a rarity—numbers have bumped up marginally but remain shockingly fewer than 5 percent—Antonoff’s cohort of indie boys may be a kind of bridging generation to a future in which the types of artists he works with can more easily find women to play that role (as Boygenius did on its album this year, for instance), or else exclusively produce themselves (as Joni Mitchell insisted on from her third album forward).

Meanwhile, though, anti-Antonoffism boils down to a more straightforward problem of 2023 fan culture, which is that the parasocial relationships fans establish in their minds with their faves make them incredibly defensive, even against their own opinions. The idol—“mother,” as Swifties call her—is always already beyond reproach. So if Lorde or Swift or Del Rey puts out music you don’t like, it can’t be because her inspiration or quality control has faltered. It must be because Jack did her dirty.

Disrespectful as this is to Antonoff, it’s ultimately even more so to the artists, and most of all to fans’ own critical faculties. As in Shakespeare’s sonnet about his mistress whose eyes are nothing like the sun, true love means acknowledging and embracing the human flaws of the beloved, not worshipping her as a god. Admitting it when you feel let down by an artist’s work only adds substance to your appreciation when they truly succeed in moving you. And it’s a hell of a lot more dignified than picking on the Jewish kid in the glasses.