Taylor Swift holds the distinction of the first artist I ever selected for myself as an artist I liked, rather than one my parents listened to. “You Belong with Me” was the first song I intentionally memorized the lyrics to when I heard it on the country radio station. The first CDs I bought were Taylor Swift’s. I downloaded them onto my pink iPod Nano, and every night before bed I would put in my earbuds, lay in bed, and mouth/act out the words of the songs on Fearless and Speak Now. I screamed bloody murder at a swim meet, scaring everyone on the pool deck in between heats, when I won next-day pit passes to the Speak Now World Tour from the same radio station whence I had initially decided on Taylor as my musical champion. I curled my hair and wore a red polo uniform shirt the day of the Red release in 2012. I made a deal with my parents that in 8th grade if I got all 100s, not As but 100s, in my classes, then they would have to get tickets to the Red Tour — and I did it. All of this is to say that Taylor and I go way back. I speak about her in good faith.
As I went to college, I started to feel like I had gotten a little older, but Taylor Swift hadn’t. I remember sitting in the library listening to Reputation for the first time and rolling my eyes — “if this girl mentions her red lips one more damn time…” And so I explored the world beyond Taylor.1 I saved “New Years Day” and a few songs from Lover to work out to, but didn’t even listen to Lover all the way through until last year. I wasn’t anti-Taylor, but I had expanded my musical tastes significantly. When folklore and evermore came out, I thought, finally! She went through her edgy Disney star phase and she’s back to meet me where I’m at emotionally, artistically. The lyrical skill I had come to so revere as a kid was back in a mature evolution. Taylor’s real talent lies in the sweeping sensation she can create through her music: the devastation of “Last Kiss”, the budding thrill of a new crush in “Enchanted”, the yearning and ephemerality of “august.” To listen to her best work is to be taken, breathless, into an emotional experience. To listen to some of her other recent work, well… is to be disappointed that it is not just middling, but downright cringe. All of the advertising leading up to Midnights suggested a return to Red acoustics, the 70s, Stevie Nicks and James Taylor, and most importantly (to me), weed. Because maybe, if she could smoke a joint in the “Lavender Haze” music video, she could take herself less seriously for once, be a little more vulnerable (I’m clearly still bitter). Taylor’s promotion of the album suggested those aspects intentionally — and then it was just regular Jack-Antonoff-synth-whatever. Not bad, but misleading marketing that kind of rubbed me the wrong way. I craved the lyricism and balladry of All Too Well (OG version) and got “Snow on the beach/weird but fucking beautiful”…
Then there was the Eras Tour. I halfheartedly tried to get tickets through a friend, only to quickly realize that even the full-hearted were hard pressed to get one. Oh well, money in my pocket. The Matty Healy relationship was early in the Eras Tour run. At the time, I thought it was so odd that people cared so much about a relationship that wasn’t theirs — and bewildering that the loving crowds could so easily turn on the star they adored. TikToks and Reddit threads filled with comments expressing empathy for those whose shows had been “ruined” by the month-long relationship. So strange. It just struck me as completely NORMAL behavior on the part of Taylor. Let the first person who has never gotten out of a long relationship and then had a rebound cast the first stone!! Their parasociality held her to an impossible standard, while the character of Matty Healy isn’t super relevant to anyone but the person dating him. I really do like The 1975’s music, but regardless of whatever comments he may or may not have made on a podcast, I don’t really need to know because I am fine stopping at “I find him as a person annoying” (have you ever seen those videos of him doing his stupid performance art at his shows??) and not looking into it further. By all means, she should have been free to date him or whomever else for as long as she wanted.
When I saw the movie in theaters, though… something shifted for me. When I heard those first strains of “It’s been a long time coming…” goosebumps everywhere. I cried during the impassioned piano version of “You’re on your own kid.” The nostalgia hit full force, the emotion of a 12-year-old me standing in the pit below those beaded flapper dresses and boots, the painted “13” on her hand, and the spell had been cast. Suddenly, I got it. I joined in the crowd of people saying that the men crying about her appearing for a few seconds during NFL games are all hateful misogynists. I decried the double standards people hold her lyricism to compared to other pop artists. I finally listened to Lover all the way through. It feels good to support someone, a woman especially, and to surround yourself with a community of women who all love the same talented artist. And then a coup de grace: she began dating Travis Kelce, an American Prince Charming. In my Swiftie residency, I cheered along when they showed her in her box at the Super Bowl, and wore my Red Tour tee that day. How perfect and romantic, she is the princess and hero, she Masterminded her Love Story, and Travis is the fairytale ending. How often do you see a real life Disney princess?
In the week prior to TTPD’s release, I was scrolling Twitter and was confronted by someone’s IP address in my feed. Far be it from me to understand what someone would do with a found IP address, but I understood it as a major violation. What was their transgression that merited this violation? They had listened to TTPD and said it wasn’t good. Hello??? Despite the reviews from the leaks and the doxxing, I was excited given my rekindled affinity for Taylor post-Eras Tour movie. I listened when it came out at 9pm on the West Coast, and woke up to a whole second album. I listened to the 2am edition once through and then switched to Joni Mitchell as a palate cleanser. Woof. I wasn’t appreciating the album so much as being waterboarded by it. The clock struck midnight, the spell broke, and my disillusionment returned.
I do know one thing: “But Daddy I Love Him” would have gone triple platinum on my iPod Nano. I actually think the chorus captures some of the same sweeping emotional feelings I discussed above that Taylor is so talented at creating through her songs. Aside from explicit references to the Sarahs and Hannahs of the earlier Eras Tour shows (very validating to me as a “Free Taylor” advocate, if semi-unprofessional of her), it conveys an emotion pretty universally felt by anyone who has dated someone that other people don’t approve of. In the chorus of “But Daddy I Love Him”, the listener singing along is able to act out those feelings just as I did laying in bed at night, to talk back to the naysayers. Doesn’t it just make you want to run, Sound of Music style, through a field with your dress unbuttoned? As the name suggests, it is a Disney princess perception of love that is as fun to sing along to as “I Won’t Say (I’m in Love)” or “Part of Your World”, no matter your relationship status. All the most iconic Taylor Swift songs do, and they will have the most lasting power. But I don’t think that the verses of “But Daddy I Love Him” have the same power.
I have not gone back and listened to the album again, as of yet. Taylor Swift’s narrative lyricism has become paradoxical in that she aims to be so specific in her narratives that it comes across as raw, vulnerable, and relatable but misses the mark because her life is not relatable at all. The subject matter is so specific to a time, this time, (e.g. the verses of “But Daddy I Love Him”) that it will not be relevant in even five years. To everyone that called it the “fast fashion of music” — overwhelming in quantity, lacking timelessness, and sure to be quickly discarded — I think they hit the nail on the head. The lyrics of “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” are, quite frankly, ridiculous. No one is pulling out her teeth, stringing her up in the gallows, and to suggest as much is evidence of a mind-boggling persecution complex. Either that, or it is pandering to an audience of people who probably have more justification for persecution complexes than she does, effectively eliminating the claims to sincerity that make her famous. That much is evident in the differences between folklore and the surrounding albums. Taylor’s cultural stock tanked after Reputation and Lover, the pandemic was in full force, and rent was due. When she set aside elaborately leaving a trail of breadcrumbs about her own life, singing about a group of made up characters actually made room for creativity and lyricism — not pandering. I do think that as a singer/songwriter she deserves her flowers, but her patent greed negates her credibility as an artist qua artist, no matter how lyrically creative she is. I am of the belief that no artist is under obligation to explain their art, but Taylor explains hers with such pedantry that I question whether it falls under the category of art, product, or some secret third thing.
Allow me, for a moment, to bring in a story from elsewhere on the internet. Last week, I was closely following the influencer Lily Chapman’s “Cancel Me” campaign against cyberbullying. I have only followed her since the beginning of her pregnancy, but since following her on TikTok, I have also gotten a few TikToks from people saying, at best, that she has a fake personality, and at worst that she is an evil narcissist and liar. Sure, her personality in videos seems a little overly sweet and positive than is realistic, but crucifying an influencer for adopting an onscreen personality that allows them to separate their business (content creation) life from their real life seems… odd to me? Should we go after actors next? Do we need to feel like we can be best friends with everyone we follow online? Regardless, Lily’s character seemed a little nebulous to me, but as with Matty Healy I wasn’t going to spend time out of my day learning why I should hate her. However, last week, when Lily released a weeklong series of videos debunking the claims of her snark Reddit, I was SHOCKED. The horrifically mean things people were saying about her, her family, her fiancé, her unborn baby. The fact that people were getting home from their jobs as nurses and social workers to go on Reddit and pick at her over seemingly contradictory points: if she spent money, if she saved money, if she lost weight, if she gained weight in pregnancy, if she was really wealthy and “pretending to be poor” or showing off supposed wealth while actually being poor. It’s one thing in a text conversation with a friend to a screenshot here and there and make snarky comments about an influencer behaving in bad taste. But in a community of 3000 people on Reddit, it became easy to see how that snark and meanness can be magnified and blown out of proportion while simultaneously serving as a source of community. In everyone’s natural desire to be a part of a larger group, and especially a group of women, so rare in most of our lives, it can reach a fever pitch. People in the Reddit reached out to Lily’s friends and family members, contacted brands she was doing deals with to try and interfere with her contracts. It was bizarre to learn about, because I don’t think that any of those people would aggressively try to get a coworker fired, or host a 3000 person meeting to discuss how much they hate that person at the church hall. Lily called this online movement for what it is: a mob. I think angry mobs are abstract for most of us because we don’t see them in real life, only in Beauty and the Beast. But learning about Lily’s experience (and God bless her, I hope she can have her baby in peace now), contextualized the insane behaviors I have mentioned above, namely the parasocial distress at Taylor dating Matty Healy and the doxxing of IP addresses over benign comments about TTPD. Swifties are also an angry mob, as quick to turn on Taylor herself as they are on anyone who says they don’t like her music.
How did Taylor Swift become this lightning rod, though? Unlike Lily, who didn’t ask for anyone to make a subreddit hating her, how complicit is Taylor in the formation of this community?
A conversation in my friend group chat the other day made me question the impact Taylor Swift has had on the verisimilitude of pop songs. Obviously artistic inspiration comes from real life and there are plenty of examples of songs that are known to the public to be written about a specific person. Fleetwood Mac may all have been in love with each other, but you think Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong were romantically involved in Porgy & Bess? Was Coldplay explicitly singing about Gwyneth Paltrow? Who Lady Gaga was singing about in The Fame Monster? Popular music is popular because it has universal qualities to it, not because it contains secret messages. But in my group chat, everyone was talking about what they perceived as a self-fulfilling prophecy in Sabrina Carpenter’s “Please Please Please”: namely, that he will end up embarrassing her. But I don’t know. Barry Keoghan embarrassing Sabrina Carpenter hinges on the assumption that “Please Please Please” is explicitly about him. Now of course, he is in the music video, but nothing in the song itself drops hints at the subject being Barry as Taylor does with her Sarahs and Hannahs. The production is a little saccharine but it is a unique concept for a pop song that IS ultimately relatable — some men will embarrass you!! But it made me think, is it a more recent development that artists so obliquely reference their life in their music to the point that we come to expect it? And more relevantly, what responsibility does Taylor Swift have in that expectation?
Taylor constructs this narrative that her songs are her personal diary, a play by play of her romantic relationships, which people love to follow in the same way they do the nouveau lore of Marvel movies. Assuming TTPD is a play-by-play of how Taylor really feels, it is ultimately a major self-own about the catch-22 she has made for herself. “I just learned these people only raise you/ to cage you”… She has the aura of a tragic figure: the Disney princess who monetized her personal life to such an extent that she feels she doesn’t have agency over that personal life anymore, and seemingly doesn’t realize how her own choices have created that dynamic — or she does, and persists in the false narrative anyway. She created millions of cutthroat fans (and billions in revenue) through her own personal mythology, but at the cost of her emotional maturity and happiness. She is Narcissus, she is Achilles and her heel is her millennial cringe that will hold her back from ever having any kind of je ne sais quoi. I guess that’s not really true — she could step back from the pond at any time, step back from the spotlight, and live whatever life she claims to really want with her billions. Like many a relationship, we’ve grown apart in adulthood, which is okay. I genuinely hope her relationship with Travis is one where she can grow and find some peace but ultimately we don’t know her at all! And we shouldn’t! Another difference between us now that we’ve grown apart — I know when to shut the laptop.
The existence of a Taylor Swift Sirius station would suggest that there are many others who cannot say the same!! Kinda wild when you think about it