Todd Rundgren has criticised Taylor Swift in unusually severe terms, calling the pop star the “apotheosis of mediocrity” and arguing that she may have “ruined music”.
Rundgren, 78, made the comments in a new interview in which he contrasted Swift with Lady Gaga, whom he praised as a “real musician” and a “classically trained piano player”.
“Swift doesn’t do anything particularly great except grow hair. She’s not a great singer. She’s not a great songwriter. She’s not a great dancer,” he said.
However, the veteran musician acknowledged Swift’s influence, particularly among younger female listeners and their families.
“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,” he said.
Rundgren, whose own songs include I Saw the Light, Can We Still Be Friends and Bang the Drum All Day, also argued that the rise of female pop stars was linked to changes in the music market.
“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. It’s the era of the female artists,” he told Vulture.
He claimed that the biggest acts were now women because boys had shifted their spending from music to video games during the 1990s.
“Back in the ’90s, boys stopped spending money on music and started spending it on video games, and that left the music market with: ‘Well, where do we go here?’” Rundgren said.
He suggested record executives then turned towards young female listeners, saying: “Well, there’s all these young girls and they’ve got their allowances, too. Why don’t we start making music for young girls instead of Pearl Jam or something like that?”
Rundgren subsequently grouped Gaga, Swift and P!nk among the artists who emerged from that shift.
His remarks came shortly before Swift won three MTV Video Music Awards, taking her career total to 33 – the highest number achieved by any artist. She moved ahead of Beyoncé, who has 30.
One of Swift’s awards was video of the year for The Fate of Ophelia, the lead single from her 2025 album The Life of a Showgirl. During her acceptance speech, she dedicated the prize to the recently deceased Dolly Parton, whom she described as the “ultimate showgirl”.
Swift, who has directed 18 of her own music videos, also received the inaugural Artist Director Award from her friend Dakota Johnson.
She used that acceptance speech to introduce the debut of her new video for Patient Zero, which stars Johnson alongside Colin Farrell and Cara Delevingne. The song was one of four released as part of the deluxe edition The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore.
The new tracks received a sharply divided critical response but gave Swift the biggest single-day Spotify streaming total of any female artist this year.
Rundgren’s career has also included producing the New York Dolls’ self-titled debut album and Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell. He composed the score for the 1994 comedy Dumb and Dumber.
