There is a "patrician arrogance" to James Taylor that accounts in part for his popularity while it at the same time explains the critical resistance to his work. Those who see themselves championing mass tastes can't accept the individualized point of view—the supremely autobiographical quality of his work—even while the audience they presume to speak for has made his modest output of albums among the best sellers ever released by his record company. One group loves him because of his past, another holds it against him. And while some rock critics made the monumental mistake of defending Grand Funk Railroad simply because they were popular (therefore making them a "people's band"),
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no one has ever made that same argument for Taylor.
James Taylor may be an all-American boy but he isn't Horatio Alger, and the lionizing of many rock stars by the rock press has as much to do with old fashioned rags-to-riches stories as does the straight culture's deification of its idols. What makes the Stones' arrogance so divine is that we all believe that long ago and far away they weren't rich and famous but poor and struggling, just like us. Taylor may never have been poor, but he sure has struggled. It's just that the type of struggle is so (superficially) different that some people can't find the resources within themselves to deal with it.
Thus, James Taylor has been the object of some of the nastiest ideological criticism yet offered in the name of rock. Some of it has been a parody of old-fashioned leftist "cult of the individual" political criticism. More often it takes the form of genre criticism not just against Taylor but against all the more idiosyncratic individualists who have emerged during the past three years, including Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Carole King. Underlying the more generalized attacks is a feeling that because these artists sacrifice the basic macho stance of the rock & roll band for a more emotionally complex—adult—attitude towards life, they exist in opposition to rock rather than as a new, evolutionary development of it. The assumption that all rock & roll ought to be boogie-nihilistic-emotionally uninhibited music obscures from view the deeper emotional and thematic content of some of the artists being attacked.
Joni Mitchell's music may lack the braggadocio of Robert Plant (thank God), but her music is infinitely more erotic. Neil Young may often sound sentimental, but then the Stones of "Salt of the Earth" were not exactly cynics. And James Taylor may have the most "unburlesque" rock act ever, but the lines "There's nothing like the sound of sweet soul music/To change a young lady's mind ..." are among the sexiest I know.
Taylor's themes are often elementary, and the most common deal with the antinomies of trust and paranoia, love and hate, peace and anger, guilt and salvation. But in his best work he particularizes those conflicts in ways that force us to finally ta
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