There’s been some grumbling about Taylor Swift’s sweep at the Grammy’s, and if you’d never heard any of her music before last night, you were probably wondering, “Who’s the off-key high schooler singing with Stevie Nicks?”

But I kind of like her. I know it’s trendier to prefer the avant-garde Lady Gaga over the vanilla teenager who writes songs in her bedroom - and you could definitely argue that Lady Gaga has stronger vocals and a more powerful onstage presence - but Taylor Swift taps into an inner adolescent part of me that rouses nostalgia somethin’ fierce.

I hadn’t bothered giving the rest of her music a listen (outside of the stuff that plays on Top 40 radio) until this morning, so I was pretty much Team Gaga until about three hours ago. Then I listened to one song, and then another, and then another. Who knew that a teenybopper ballad like “I’d Lie” would get me the tiniest bit choked up?

And suddenly I found myself experiencing some long-lost pang of yearning, the kind of yearning you only feel when you’re a high school freshman and everything is new and the future is perfect and your entire existence looks like, well, a Taylor Swift music video - at least in your head. You’re yearning for a boy, a feeling, an experience that’s been promised to you in Sweet Valley High novels and “7th Heaven” episodes, and that’s all you ever daydream about on weekends as you ride alone in the backseat of your parents ‘86 Dodge Caravan on the way to Woodfield Mall to shop for new sweaters.

At least until I remembered that this was not at all how high school turned out to be. I was mostly bored and fidgety, spending Friday nights at home studying for AP exams and Saturday afternoons watching my boyfriend play video games, feeling angsty at everybody and everything and thinking that I couldn’t graduate soon enough. I went to college under the impression that I’d missed out on the quintessential high school experience (especially after I took the ACTs or APs or something at a private school in the suburbs that looked like everything I thought a high school should look like). I got suckered in to the whitebread American High School Dream, and left incredibly disappointed at the lack of teen drama and romance I’d been led to expect.

But I think there’s something to be said for the fact that “Fifteen” manages to evoke falsified memories from someone who used to be an awkward, angry little Asian girl at a Chicago public high school. It’s a surprisingly powerful piece of escapism that runs in the same vein of “Twilight” (which unwittingly sucked me in about a month ago, underlying messages be damned), a reminder of a time when things seemed a lot simpler and less bogged down in the doldrums of adult responsibility. It’s nice.

I’ve been relishing in the yen of adolescence all afternoon now, not thinking about anything in particular, just feeling what I used to feel when I’d listen to the radio in the backseat of my parents’ car and daydream an elaborate fantasy about charming, shaggy-haired boys and school dances and giggly girlfriends trying on dresses at the mall.

So I kind of get it. The whole Taylor Swift thing. And as much as I like Lady Gaga, “Poker Face” never quite elicited the same emotional reaction that jostled me down memory lane this morning.

jessicachu:

1. Confusion

The first thing you tend to ask when you are confronted with the artist born Stefani Germanotta is who or what is a Lady Gaga?

It’s a lot to take at first, and anyone who sees the native New Yorker wearing an outfit made of bubbles or dressed head to toe — literally, head to toe — in red lace might simply shake their head in bewilderment. Her look is confrontational, and she’s not carved out of the same supermodels-as-singers mold as the Beyoncés, Britneys and Christinas of the world. And what’s with that name — Gaga? What does that even mean? This mystified state then leads to …

2. Dismissal

The jaded music fan is quick to write off Gaga as all style, no substance. She needs to wear those outfits to make people talk! She needs to create controversy to overshadow the fact her songs are idiotic dance-pop trifles! (Similar criticisms have belied Gaga’s forebears, including Madonna.)

You see the existence and popularity of Gaga as an affront to your esteemed, finely honed musical tastes. Yet as soon as you become indignant enough to say she epitomizes everything that’s wrong with music today, you’ve already fallen into her vortex. Because soon that dismissal leads to …

3. Curiosity

You simply can’t believe how far she goes in some of those live performances, whether she’s staging her own assassination at the MTV Video Music Awards (complete with copious amounts of fake blood) or breaking bottles over a piano at the American Music Awards, so you seek out more examples to build your case against her. (That’s what YouTube is for, isn’t it?) And suddenly you start to realize, hey, those songs you first sloughed off aren’t so bad after all.

Take “Poker Face,” which on the surface is another in a long line of empty, synth-laden club tracks, but in actuality is a bi-curious lament about pining after women when you’re with a man, or vice versa. Or “Paparazzi,” a love song wrapped in a metaphor for our fame-obsessed, celebrity-driven times, with the relationship in the song mirroring the paparazzi/star dynamic.

In short, they’re smart — plus they’re amazingly catchy. A few spins of either and they’ll be stuck in your head, rattling around your brain, until you realize you don’t really mind so much anymore. Your defenses are starting to fall. Your Gaga curiosity has now led to …

4. Acceptance

You download “Poker Face” and probably “Bad Romance,” too, and come to grips with the fact they’re really good pop songs. And when you overhear others who are in the Confusion or Dismissal phases of Lady Gaga Fever, you find yourself defending her, and arguing how you were once there, too, but have overcome your initial doubts and turned into a fan. Heck, maybe you even bought a ticket to one of her concerts. You then recognize your acceptance has lead to …

5. Obsession

Gaga has got you in her trap, and there’s nothing to feel ashamed about. She is an ambitious performance artist with a striking visual style and an image that is totally of her own volition. She writes her own hits, and is not a product of some Swedish pop conglomeration with nefarious plans of world domination. She’s in-your-face and provocative, she demands attention and earns the strong response she gets from people. She’s a risk-taker.

Yes, Gaga is a confluence of her influences, a direct descendant of David Bowie, Madonna, Liberace, “Project Runway” and Us Weekly. But apart from that, she’s an original.

So if there’s a cure for Lady Gaga Fever, keep it, we’re not interested. This romance is so bad it’s good.