I recognized parts of three songs while recently attending the “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” movie.

The rest of it – all nearly three hours of it – were songs I never heard before.

I’m more of a Led Zeppelin, Beatles, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Willie Nelson, Warren Zevon, Linda Rondstadt, Cher, Queen, etc., kind of guy.

If the music is 50 years old or older, I like it.

So, sitting through the Taylor Swift movie was not a thrill but it was a revelation.

Younger members of my family loved the movie. So did the thousands of people in the audience of the filmed concert.

There’s nothing wrong with the music. It obviously speaks to millions of people. Just ask the people who danced in the aisles of the movie theatre.

But she’s not for me.

And that’s OK.

Not that Taylor Swift needs an old guy coming to her defense.

She doesn’t.

But she and her fans don’t need a bunch of old dudes running down her music, her celebrity and phenomenon, either.

Does she need to be Time’s Person of the Year? A list that has included every American president, with exception of Gerald Ford, since Franklin D. Roosevelt? A list that has also included Gandhi and Churchill as well as Hitler and Stalin as the people who most influenced a year?

I don’t know.

But the Times Person of the Year list has also included Ted Turner, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Wallis Simpson. So, the Taylor Swift choice has precedence. For good or bad, the Person of the Year is supposed to be the person who most influenced a year.

Taylor Swift fits that description.

From boosting NFL ratings to breaking pop music records to reconfiguring artists rights to international cities campaigning for her to hold a concert in their venues to boost their economies to recording and performing songs that speak to millions and millions of people, she has impacted 2023.

Like her or not, to say otherwise is merely fooling yourself.

But there are plenty of old dudes who take every opportunity to run down her music, or her, or even worse, her fans.

Just because she’s not for us doesn’t mean she’s not only good but brilliant to her millions of fans. She has something to say that they want to hear. Just because we don’t want to hear it doesn’t mean it has no value.

We old guys need to get over ourselves, though given we’re old guys that’s not likely to happen, until well, you know.

No one’s taking our music away. Taylor Swift is not coming to take away our Meatloaf “Bat Out of Hell” albums. The Swifties are not going to turn our Pink Floyd “The Dark Side of the Moon” eight-tracks into streaming versions of Taylor Swift’s “1989.”

Snarky rants about how her music is horrible and her fans have no taste are just ridiculous.

Consider excerpts of this rant: “ … not merely awful; I would consider it sacrilegious to say anything less than … god awful. … so unbelievably horribly, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art that they qualify as crowned heads of anti-music …”

Or: “… The full house was made up largely of upper middle-class young ladies, stylishly dressed, carefully made up, brought into town by private cars or suburban buses for their night to howl, to let go, scream, bump, twist and clutch themselves ecstatically out there in the floodlights for everyone to see and with the full blessings of all authority …”

These comments aren’t about Taylor Swift, by the way.

They’re from the 1960s, the Boston Globe and The Nation, written about The Beatles.

“Visually they are a nightmare, tight, dandified Edwardian-Beatnik suits and great pudding bowls of hair. Musically they are a near disaster, guitars and drums slamming out a merciless beat that does away with secondary rhythms, harmony and melody,” a Newsweek critic wrote of The Beatles in 1964.

So when we post “Taylor Swift stinks” on Facebook, we sound like those old dudes writing about the Beatles. The old guys we once smirked at and viewed as dudes with sticks up their you-know-whats.

To a younger generation, we’re those old dudes now. Say it ain’t so? Well, quit posting dumb things about how you think Taylor Swift is awful.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m no convert to Swiftiedom.

I’m not grooving down to “Look What You Made Me Do” or sharing a bonding moment with my grands over “I Knew You Were Trouble” – as a matter of fact, I had to google “taylor swift songs” to find these song titles. I haven’t listened to any Taylor Swift songs since seeing the movie a couple months ago, or at least I don’t think I have.

But I appreciate it now. I saw the faces of her fans in the movie. I

saw the excitement on the faces of my family members when we bought them tickets to see the movie.

If you don’t like her songs, old dudes, just remember, she’s not for you. Look at some of your younger family members, Taylor Swift is for them.

Dean Poling is a former editor with The Valdosta Daily Times and The Tifton Gazette. He can be reached at deanpoling@ymail.com.