There are certain creatures who, through the force of their will, or through some inexplicable fate, ascend to the throne of pop culture. One such creature is Taylor Swift, a woman whose sentiment has yielded a kingdom of devoted listeners. She, an empress of song, each note carefully positioned, each lyric smoothed to a palatable glow. Her music, rich in universal emotion, is a cathedral in which millions gather.
But Beabadoobee does not seek to erect palaces, rather, she dwells where chords dream, where melodies seem less constructed than stumbled upon. Her music does not arrive like a diamond; it is coarse, unfiltered. She does not fear the imperfect.
Her chord changes, dissonant and restless, as if each progression were a confession muttered in a lonely corridor. Beabadoobee chooses paths that lead away from certainty, where a song does not always conclude where one expects, where the listener is left not satisfied, but unsettled.
While Taylor Swift moves between her chosen styles with the grace of a monarch selecting different gowns for different occasions, Beabadoobee does not step lightly from one world to another—she collides with them, fractures them, fuses them together in new and startling ways.
Here, the aching nostalgia of 90s grunge finds itself wedded to the hushed intimacy of bedroom pop.
Here, the dreamlike haze of shoegaze shatters into the raw urgency of punk.
She is not a diplomat, carefully managing her alliances—she is a wanderer, an exile, never entirely belonging to any one kingdom.
Authenticity is a vague term, a word thrown carelessly into conversations about art. But Beabadoobee’s music carries this weight—not in dramatic flourishes, not in grand proclamations, but in its sheer refusal to obscure the flawed and the fragile. Swift, in contrast, constructs something more refined, more perfected, where emotion is captured, distilled, and framed neatly within the golden edges of a chorus. It is not a question of sincerity—both are sincere—but rather of how much one is willing to expose. Beabadoobee allows herself to remain unvarnished, her music less a product and more a confession scrawled in the dim glow of a bedroom lamp.
What, then, is true greatness in an artist? Is it the ability to reign over the hearts of millions? Is it the power to transform a personal sorrow into a universal hymn? Or is it something more dangerous, something that cannot be neatly sold, something that lingers uncomfortably in the corners of the mind long after the song has ended?
Taylor Swift is a master. She has built something vast, something enduring. Beabadoobee, in her quiet defiance, in the raw edges of her sound, represents something more elusive—perhaps not greatness as the world defines it, but greatness as the soul recognizes it.