{"id":862949,"date":"2026-09-27T23:50:08","date_gmt":"2026-09-27T23:50:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/862949\/"},"modified":"2026-09-27T23:50:08","modified_gmt":"2026-09-27T23:50:08","slug":"famed-rock-producer-blames-gaming-for-giving-us-taylor-swift","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/862949\/","title":{"rendered":"Famed Rock Producer Blames Gaming For Giving Us Taylor Swift"},"content":{"rendered":"

Musician, record producer and early glam rocker Todd Rundgren has been making music, seemingly endlessly, since he began in 1970. On top of his own cult works, he produced albums for XTC, Patti Smith, Hall and Oates, Sparks, The New York Dolls, Bad Religion and most famously Meat Loaf\u2019s Bat Out of Hell. In a career spanning check-in with Vulture<\/a>, the musician unloaded grievances against modern radio hits, with him and the magazine pinning video games for the decline of men making popular music.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe biggest artists in the world are female artists at this point, and that\u2019s because of video games,\u201d Rundgren tells Vulture. \u201cBack in the \u201990s, boys stopped spending money on music and started spending it on video games.\u201d<\/p>\n

While any dude north of 50 spend a lot of time asking \u201cwhere did all the rock music go,\u201d Rundgren seems confident that video games are to blame. While the \u201890s began on fixated on mosh pit makers conjurers Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Nine Inch Nails, it ended in contrast with boy bands and pop stars like *NSync and the Spice Girls dominating the music world.<\/p>\n

Responsible for what remains the ninth best selling album of all time, Rundgren doesn\u2019t hate pop stars by default, and seems to like Lady Gaga quite a bit. But he doesn\u2019t seem to be a fan of video games, for the sin of robbing young men\u2019s attention and weekly allowance when they could have been trying to impress older girls with a guitar. And he really hates Taylor Swift, and the fella-less music environment that gave her stardom, who he says \u201cdoesn\u2019t do anything particularly great except grow hair.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll be honest, somehow when I first read Vulture\u2019s headline \u201cThe biggest artists in the world are female,\u201d Todd Rundgren observes, \u201cand that\u2019s because of video games,\u201d my dumb brain somehow assumed that he meant the subtle influences of Yuzo Koshiro\u2019s in Britney\u2019s work<\/a>. Even if he is notable for embracing the internet far before his peers, Rundgren\u2019s read feels preciously antiquated.<\/p>\n

Video games in the \u201890s were certainly overwhelmingly marketed towards boys, but that shifted rapidly when omega level hits like Pok\u00e9mon and The Sims proved those limiting assumptions wrong. And while the numbers continue to show the diversity of players, the gender normative front of the culture war remains exhaustive. As far as examples to the contrary of this specific case, chart toppers now openly gush<\/a> over their gaming obsessions, Gaga included<\/a>. So rock stars and Rockstar Games are not mutually exclusive.<\/p>\n

Since we lost Steve Albini, who actually did appear in a video game<\/a>, we don\u2019t get to choose our rock n\u2019 roll cranks like we used to. While he opened the question on Hermit of Mink Hollow, Rundgren isn\u2019t asking gamers or Swifties \u201cCan We Still Be Friends?\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Musician, record producer and early glam rocker Todd Rundgren has been making music, seemingly endlessly, since he began…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":862950,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[88,3287,216,29612,4915],"class_list":["post-862949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-lady-gaga","tag-music","tag-rockstar","tag-taylor-swift"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/862949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=862949"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/862949\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/862950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=862949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=862949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=862949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}