Photo Credit: Todd Rundgren by Carl Lender / CC by 2.0

Todd Rundgren takes aim at Taylor Swift, calling her music mediocre and blaming video games for the biggest artists in the world being female.

Singer-songwriter and producer Todd Rundgren, known for his own hits like “I Saw the Light” and producing classic albums like Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell, took aim at Taylor Swift’s dominance in contemporary pop music. In a new interview with Vulture, Rundgren called Swift “the apotheosis of mediocrity” and blamed boys spending their allowance on video games. Wait, what?

“It’s the era of the female artists,” said Rundgren, who was asked who he would make fun of if he were to produce an album solely for that purpose. “Taylor Swift, of course.”

Rundgren famously said of producing Bat Out of Hell in 1977 that he didn’t care whether the album succeeded or not; he just wanted to make fun of Bruce Springsteen.

“To me, Taylor Swift is the apotheosis of mediocrity,” said Rundgren. “There’s an argument to be made that she ruined music. It’s an understandable phenomenon.”

“The biggest artists in the world are female artists at this point, and that’s because of video games,” he explained. “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?’ And they said, ‘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?'”

“So you got Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Pink, and many artists of that ilk,” Rundgren continued. “Lady Gaga, she’s a real musician. She’s a classically trained piano player. Taylor Swift doesn’t do anything particularly great except grow hair. She’s not a great singer, not a great songwriter. She’s not a great dancer. [Taylor’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.”

Rundgren’s remarks arrive after Taylor Swift cleaned up at the 2026 MTV Video Music Awards over the weekend. The “Opalite” singer won three awards on Sunday night, bringing her grand total of VMAs to 33, which makes her the most awarded artist in VMA history.