Todd Rundgren Calls Taylor Swift “the Apotheosis of Mediocrity”

Todd Rundgren has named Taylor Swift as the artist who “ruined music,” in an interview with Vulture’s Devon Ivie.

The 76-minute conversation, published by Vulture, ranged across Rundgren’s career — from touring with Ringo Starr to his history with members of the Band — before turning to his production work on Meat Loaf’s 1977 album Bat Out of Hell. Rundgren has admitted he saw that record “as a spoof of Bruce Springsteen.”

Asked who the target would be if he produced Bat Out of Hell today, Rundgren did not hesitate. “Taylor Swift, of course,” he told Ivie. “There’s an argument to be made that she ruined music. It’s an understandable phenomenon. It’s just that, to me, Taylor Swift is the apotheosis of mediocrity.”

Rundgren then offered an unorthodox explanation for why the biggest artists in the world are now women. In his telling, boys in the 1990s began spending their money on video games instead of music, leaving the industry searching for a new market.

“That left the music market with, ‘Well, where do we go here?’” Rundgren said. “And they said, ‘Well, there’s all these young girls and they’ve got their allowances, too.’”

He circled back to Swift by the end of his reply, dismissing her talents across the board.

“Taylor Swift doesn’t do anything particularly great except grow hair,” he said. “She’s not a great singer. She’s not a great songwriter. She’s not a great dancer. She’s a role model for what was a very young generation of women, and now for those women’s daughters as well, because it’s mothers and daughters going to Taylor Swift shows.”

The comments position Rundgren, one of rock’s longstanding contrarians, against an artist whose fan base is famously quick to defend her. Swift — whom Rundgren described as a “Cleveland devotee” in Ivie’s framing of her devoted following — has built her career on precisely the singer-songwriter credentials Rundgren disputes.

The comparison carries a certain symmetry. Bat Out of Hell, which Rundgren produced, became one of the best-selling albums of all time by sending up the maximalist rock of its era. Swift’s catalogue now dominates streaming charts and stadium tours on a scale that dwarfs even that album’s success, with multi-generational audiences — the mothers and daughters Rundgren cited — filling her shows.

Rundgren, for his part, shows no sign of softening. Now in his seventies, he remains one of the few figures in rock willing to take aim at the most powerful artist in pop, and his remarks suggest that if a Bat Out of Hell for the 2020s exists, he already knows who its subject would be.