Swiftly
I've been listening to ‘Blank Space’ every day since the music video was released last week. I can’t help myself.
I don’t think I can be marked out as an ‘active’ Taylor Swift fan. I don’t own a single one of her records, digitally or otherwise. I've never seen her perform live, and likely never will due to prohibitive costs and a disinclination to wait around for her to drift past on a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade float or queue up for the chance to get my waiflike frame crushed against the partitions cordoning off the seething throngs the next time she performs for Good Morning America.
According to Quantcast, I don’t fall into any of the demographics that are most actively engaging with her brand (apart from the ‘making under 50k’ one hahahaha). I didn't know that 1989 was coming out when it did. Shake It Off only ended up on my radar because Facebook kept blowing up after the VMAs. I just don’t actively seek her music out.
Every few months, however, I’ll start to hear one of her songs played with greater and greater frequency in gas stations and supermarkets, on seemingly every radio station simultaneously. I’ll dislike the jingle at first. I’ll tell myself that she’s lost it, that this will be the album, single, or whatever that may not necessarily divorce her from the court of public favor, but will at least allow me to turn off and stop regarding her work with fondness when it makes its way into my life.
It is thus with alarming inevitability then that before long I’ll find myself on youtube, feverishly hammering her name into the search bar, allowing auto-fill to provide me with the suggestion of whatever her latest confection is. This happens almost unconsciously. I am driven by some snatch of a chorus, a snippet of a bridge, a vocal trill in a verse that wheedles its way into my thoughts and remains unshakable no matter what I do. By the third listen, I am hers again.
The current ubiquity of 1989 has offered fresh opportunity for Swift’s admirers to wax lyrical about her craft, and for her detractors to damn her as everything from a particularly cloying pop automaton whose only talent is racking up messy uncoupling after messy uncoupling, to a mossbacked token of the patriarchy in red lipstick.
She is neither.
Why do we, as a culture, get so lathered when Swift sings about the relationships she’s had? Relationships are what she knows. The Beatles were doing precisely the same fifty years ago, Leadbelly fifty years before that. Betrayal, heartbreak, anguish and eventual recovery have been staples of pop music since its inception. Emotional fodder is the lifeblood musicians have always wallowed in.
The argument has been made that Swift’s lyrical preoccupations, particularly on her earlier records, are regressive, that they buy into a tired and outmoded archetype of “boys boys boys” and make little if any use of the unique podium Swift has in her ultra-visible superstardom.
What of it? Why does Swift need to make music with a message for anyone other than herself? I don’t subscribe to the notion that just because she has a certain amount of popularity, she is beholden to conducting herself in a certain way. The same sentiment applies to the music and carefully cultivated personas of Miley, Ke$ha, Bey. None of them need to kowtow to a specific mode of being or creating. Miley shouldn't put her foam finger away because it offends doddering oldtimers any more than Taylor should reign in her romantic preoccupations because cynics will label her obsessive or slavish. If by happenstance a pedestrian derives positive value from some aspect of the disparate words or messages or projected images belonging to these immensely talented women, brilliant.
My roommate was playing the newest Arctic Monkeys album today. AM has been the band’s biggest international triumph, and has rightly cemented their status as The Biggest Rock Band In The World that isn't a shambling relic like Foo Fighters or U2 are. Every single song on the LP deals with Alex Turner pining for a litany of lovers, whether from his past, present, or some parabolic imaginary. While I've listened to Arctic Monkeys since their first record came out, I can’t think of a single time that any corner of their critical reception has went sour based upon Turner’s romantic fixations.
Swift is no more besotted than he is, yet has had to resort to using her art as a weapon to fend off her critics with messages of apathy and tongue-in-cheek self-parody (Shake It Off and Blank Space, respectively). Turner, as far as I can tell, has never had to do anything in addition to his songwriting beyond gelling his quiff and buying leather jackets.
Ultimately, Taylor Swift seems to exist in an unenviable position where she is reviled for the frequency of her dating life by one group and concurrently lambasted for a perceived retrograde quality in her songwriting and opinions by another.
What can she do?
Postscript: I’m aware that there is also a racial discourse surrounding Swift, particularly regarding her use of backup dancers in her Shake It Off music video. These writers offer contrasting takes on the issue that are both very interesting and worth reading. I just noticed that Chloe Angyal also makes a Shake It Off joke at the end of her piece but I’m not changing mine because of that .
