Thoughts on Taylor Swift

Do I like her?

The other day, I found myself looking haplessly for something, anything, to focus on besides the ecological crisis — this unbearable rupture we have created with our wonderfully fine-tuned biosphere, which threatens our species with near-term extinction as it annihilates millions of other intricately evolved life-forms — and I decided it was time to try to understand this Taylor Swift phenomenon, which, until recently, I had ignored. So far, I am failing horribly at my seriously-intended New Year’s resolution, which was to become less judgmental and more positive, upbeat, in my thinking and writing. I don’t like this feeling.

I don’t want to be a hater! I want to love!

I yearn to participate more in mainstream or even alternative currents of mass appeal and general interest, with enthusiasm and gusto. Also, as is often the case, I am either far too early or absurdly late to the party.

Unless you have been living under a rock, you know 2023 was the year Taylor Swift became some kind of utterly dominant pop culture phenomenon. She was on the cover of Time Magazine as “Person of the Year.” Her tour makes gazillions of dollars and, when it lands, singlehandedly revives the economies of mid-sized cities. She has an army of zealous fans, “Swifties,” who consider her their idol and scry her lyrics for secret codes.  She goes out with a moderately articulate football star who just helped his team, the Kansas City Chiefs (I’m always surprised by the indigenous references), take the Super Bowl. Harvard has a course about her. She is “America’s Sweetheart,” terrifying to MAGA Republicans who are afraid she could tilt the scales of the next election if she pipes up for Biden. However she has been resolutely apolitical until now, albeit supporting LGBT  rights and admitting, in one interview, to being pro-choice.

All this was happening — I kept getting snippets about Taylor Swift in my various news feeds — yet I could not, for the life of me, identify any of her songs or get any sense of who or what she was outside of “bland pop star archetype.” The massive totality of her success and my simultaneous complete blankness about anything about her whatsoever started to pique my interest. I am aware, in writing this after a relatively brief immersion in Swift’s extensive oeuvre (something like ten albums since her first, recorded when she was fifteen), I probably am missing much of the nuance and context. I don’t watch the Grammys or follow the ins-and-outs of the gossip around Swift and her fellow stratospheric superstars. There’s much that I don’t know — which is particularly problematic as many of her songs reference details of her personal life and past relationships, much as we find with other current megastars, like Kanye West, whose lures I also resist (perhaps a topic for another essay).

I felt, as I prepared to write this, that I should start with a simple declarative proposition, such as: I like Taylor Swift, or perhaps its opposite: I hate Taylor Swift. But the fact is that my feelings about Taylor Swift don’t fit into those convenient categories. She seems an innate, inevitable, organic expression of this bizarre, inconclusive time we are all swimming around in. Liking, loving, hating, or not liking Taylor Swift would be about as useful as liking or not liking the weather, space, nature, or time — or perhaps Nike, Amazon, or Apple. I hope to get beyond such useless dichotomies to understand the totality of the Taylor Swift hyper-object.

Do I think Taylor Smith is an artist? That’s an interesting, complex question. I don’t know how to answer it yet. Her work — now that I am playing her albums on repeat, and getting to like them more as I listen —strikes me as a form of precision manipulation, a refined technology of emotive mimicry, which, I can understand, would have a profound magnetic pull on those susceptible to it (am I one of those people?). There is certainly artistry in that, but it seems more the artistry of virtuosic craftsmanship, I feel, than the artistry of art. But isn’t that generally the case with effective pop music, with its almost AI-like use of hooks? (and now AI systems such as Loudly.ai are improving, rapidly, at generating machine-made versions of such ear worms).

What makes something “art” is, for me, related to the underlying purpose of the artist, who uses whichever form to create a particular world and transmit a kind of bandwidth. (It is funny: what next jumps into my mind is the question, Was Lena Riefenstahl an artist?, which indicates, in my subconscious anyway, some link between Taylor Swift and the aesthetics of Fascism. More on this later, I hope!). I look to art to expand my sense of what’s possible or conceivable, in some way. I do not find that quality, after a few day’s listening, in Swift’s songs.

I’m a huge, lifelong fan of The Beatles. I was born in 1966 and I still remember — as one of my earliest memories — my beloved live-in babysitter bringing home the brand new Abbey Road. She gave me the honor of peeling off the plastic wrap, sitting in our living room on St Marks Place. How I felt, even at that young age, the totemic power of that object, that record, which somehow — like other late Beatles records — represented creative liberation, freedom, potentiality, spiritual achievement. I would feel terrible if I was to completely miss some new pop culture phenomenon that was as important and relevant, now, as The Beatles were back then. After all, the Beatles had their curmudgeons and naysayers too. If Taylor Swift represents the coming of something new and valuable for the culture, I feel I must grapple with it, reconcile with it, respond to it.

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I get that the Taylor Swift phenomenon is related to the changing status of women in contemporary American society, which is an ongoing process. Essentially, men are falling woefully behind women, in terms of education and, increasingly, entrepreneurial or corporate success. (I suppose I could look up the exact statistics, but as a man, I am, of course, inveterately lazy.)

In one song, “The Man”, she riffs on how much easier life would be if she was male. The video — in which Swift is convincingly transformed into a Leo DiCaprio-esque playboy — is funny. The song is, I must admit, quite good.

In essence, women have broken through the “glass ceiling.” They have learned, in Sheryl Sandberg’s phrase, to “lean in.” The female contingent of contemporary humanity scored a victory with the recent #metoo movement — starting to settle old scores. It turns out that the Internet — an invisible meshwork woven from memes, tropes and narratives — can work fantastically for women, who are maestros of emotive self-expression and communication compared to men, in their efforts to gain or at least equalize power "from below” (since men hold the greater physical force while maintaining control over the weapons of war) while shifting the contemporary discourse into more favorable terms for them (see Warren Farrell, for instance, for details).

If there is, indeed, a “battle of the sexes,” it definitely seems, in contemporary middle class American life, women won this round, hand’s down. They are starting to drive the corporate machines. Meanwhile, young men cower in their parent’s basements, becoming video-game-addicted Incels, toggling toward Alt Right tropes, as women veer liberal/progressive and start companies. Of course, this could turn out to be a Pyrrhic victory, but that’s another story.

Taylor Swift, a 34-year-old billionaire, is an archetypal “girl boss” who has driven her entrepreneurial enterprise, from the age of fifteen, beyond various plateau of success to its current stratospheric heights. She has successfully challenged the power of the record labels, and has even impacted the tech monopolies. Just recently, when pornographic “deep fakes” of Swift began to circulate on Twitter and other platforms, her influence led to rapidly convened congressional hearings and the start of a pushback. She merely shakes her blond mane disapprovingly, and the State shivers and reacts. At a level completely outside of music, Swift represents the aspirational dreams of the many millions of young women who form her core audience.

Part of what seems peculiar about her success — from my outsider’s perspective — is her complete lack of “edge.” I don’t even know what “edge” means exactly, or why I find it important. Now I see that Swift’s music is not devoid of nuance, humor, and irony — it just felt that way, to me, at first, as a new listener. I suppose there is a historical trajectory of female mega-rock-pop-stars from Debbie Harry to Madonna to Lady Gaga, Amy Winehouse, Beyonce (I struggle to focus on her also), Miley Cyrus and Swift. I am sure I am leaving out important names. But there was a sense, with Madonna and Gaga anyway, that the pop diva had to have edge, somehow, approach taboo topics or at least copy and imitate avant-garde tropes (Madonna pirated “Vogueing” from drag culture; Gaga went to art school in New York and co-opted elements from the performative avant-garde).

Swift’s lack of whatever we mean by “cool,” “edge,” or “hip” seems part of the secret of her success. She defines, embodies, the Neoliberal “mainstream;” what philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls the “entrepreneurial self,” and our inherently insecure gig-economy culture which enforces “perpetual self-optimization”.

What’s Entertainment?

This was the year she perfected her craft—not just with her music, but in her position as the master storyteller of the modern era. The world, in turn, watched, clicked, cried, danced, sang along, swooned, caravanned to stadiums and movie theaters, let her work soundtrack their lives. For Swift, it’s a peak. “This is the proudest and happiest I’ve ever felt, and the most creatively fulfilled and free I’ve ever been,” Swift tells me. “Ultimately, we can convolute it all we want, or try to overcomplicate it, but there’s only one question.” Here, she adopts a booming voice. “Are you not entertained?” - Sam Lansky, Time Magazine

One of my stray thoughts, inspired by reflecting on Taylor Swift, is that there is no such thing, in reality, as “entertainment,” as something outside of other aspects of life. Music, television shows, films, and so on, are woven into our life-world. The time we invest into them is not just empty time. They take our attention and our energy. The time, energy and attention we invest into them is time, energy, and attention that doesn’t go somewhere else. “Entertainment” is inherently ideological, political and, also, in our current straits, ecological.

If Swift is “the master storyteller of the modern era” (is she?!), what story is she telling?

In “The Truth About Taylor Swift: Too many young women yearn for annihilation,” Mary Harrington, a contributor for Unherd, argues that Swift’s popularity stems from her mining of a thousand-year trope: the “powerful” theme of “thwarted, exquisitely painful romance.” She writes:

Beyond the first flush of love… lies mostly darkness, longing, and perhaps bittersweet recollection. My takeaway from Swift’s oeuvre is that a happy ending matters less than the sheer romanticness of love elevated by whatever dooms it to destruction, whether that’s the lover, some external circumstance, or the protagonist’s inner demons.

Harrington believes the Anglo-European fascination with this trope goes all the way back, ten centuries, to the Cathars and the “poetic mythologization” of courtly love, where longing for the unattainable Earthly beloved was a stand-in for the sought-after union with the Divine, which could never be consummated except through death.