Taylor and Miley: the difference between talent and genuis

Miley Cyrus is a talented girl, a fine comedienne with a nice voice and some good -and sometimes some great- material. She might be the Marie Osmond of the 00s and she might be more.

With a howling pack of tweens and younger girls screaming for blood she appears to be traversing the horrors of fame at a young age with a lot of aplumb but she has a problem: Miley isn’t good enough and she is staring at a mirror double who is more than good enough. Lennon to her McCartney; Beatles to her Monkees; Taylor to her Miley.

Eighteen year old country rock superstar Taylor Swift doesn’t have much of a voice and on SNL she was awkward and, well, young girly but Taylor Swift can write songs that cut across age and style. The complaint that her lyrics are Junior High level is silly and not true (first, life is subjective and the importance of her lyric is precisely mirrord by the importance in her own private life and two, they are good) or the whinge that she is a studio creation is irrelevant: the songs work on acoustic guitar or in the studio cum laboratory.

What you (and Miley) are left with is two albums filled with first rate songs (songs so good you can’t be taught how to write em -it’s a gift): “Stay Beautiful,” “Hey Stephen,” “The Way I Loved You” (apparently kissing and cursing in the rain is important), “Teardrops On My Guitar,” “Tim McGraw,” “Our Song”… on and on, not a dog in the lot.

One of Taylor’s best songs is “Love Story”, a retelling of Romeo and Juliet with a happy ending and killers hook (the pop remix sounds like the Cars) rat-a-tat-tat verse reaching to “this love is difficult but it’s real” and the stutter that takes her to the bridge… a great song.

But Taylor is great already: she just knows how to write songs and Miley doesn’t and at some point, two or five years from now taylor is going to make the album of the life time and Miley probably won’t.